The Green Boat Quotes

“Acceptance is the end of our argument with reality. Once we face the facts, no matter how disturbing they are, we feel calmer and less crazy. Erik Erikson defined clarity as “the capacity to fear accurately.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Our media outlets pay attention to the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but not to species extinction rates. In this country money is well organized, but survival is not.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Even now, after overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, we are still discussing the issue as if it were a belief, not a fact.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“If you want to know the time, ask a dog. They always know, and they’ll tell you the correct time, which is now, now, now.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“We can deal with our cultural and environmental crises only after we deal with our human crises of trauma, denial, and emotional paralysis. This will require that most difficult of all human endeavors, facing our own despair. This involves waking from our trance of denial, facing our own pain and sorrow, accepting the world as it is, adapting, and living more intentionally.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Climate change is not a hot topic. As author Bill McKibben points out in a post on TomDispatch.com, in 2011, “ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox spent twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as global warming.” He documents that over the last three years, a mere ninety-eight minutes of prime-time television news was devoted to covering this global challenge. In fact, in 2011, the Sunday talk shows spent exactly nine minutes of time on climate change— all of it given over to Republican politicians focused on denying it.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Healing the earth is not a liberal or conservative idea— it is a form of prayer.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“I also try not to evaluate myself in terms of the results of my actions. Rather, I focus on the quality of my interactions and the joy I feel every day.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Too many people only dream at night. I like to dream during the day.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“I do it for the relationships. I like to spend my time with people who are trying to make the world a fairer, kinder place. I’ve been in groups like this since college, and they have made me happy.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“As we go about our troubled and sometimes frenzied lives, in this time of the Great Acceleration, we have close at hand ways we can move out of the time zone of our current century and into a transcendent experience. We can do this by simply recognizing our kinship with another living being, by finding one beautiful thing to enjoy, or by allowing ourselves to be swept away emotionally by the miraculous and intricate world we have all around us.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“This bittersweet phenomenon of a successful event paired with no discernible political gain seemed to be a chronic problem for our group. However, we were experiencing a victory that could not be taken away from us. That is, we were by now a transcendent, connected community. We were learning that relationships always trump agendas, and that a good process is sustaining, regardless of outcome.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Coalition members learned to make our points via stories. It is impossible to argue with a story that simply reflects the experience of the storyteller. People like stories and remember them. They create emotions that are essential to motivation and action. Emotions, not facts, are what energize humans to act. Our best stories were about our own inconsistencies and failings or about our own emotional struggles with the issue.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“when people come together, they can accomplish more than they can by individual actions. With this transformation from “me” to “we,” the wind picks up, the sails fill, and the boat is off. . . Media coverage tends to focus on one person and doesn’t point out that the heroine of a story has the support of a small group behind her.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“This pivotal experience taught Mitch that to participate in a democracy, you must show up, meet people, and volunteer. It doesn’t work to wait to be discovered.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Children are also effective at influencing others. Many times in the last few years, I have witnessed children’s letters and testimony touch and influence hard-boiled politicians in ways that adults cannot. Politicians are people, too, and they have children and grandchildren. An articulate and earnest child who asks only for a sustainable world can soften their hearts.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Visiting with other human beings may be one of the most ancient healing tonics.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“What I find most sustaining is what I loved as a girl: lying down on my back and looking at the sky. That is my first memory and I hope it is my last.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Children are a great aid in both stress reduction and joy production.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“. . . a philosophy that teaches: try to live a life that is not too arduous, not too comfortable, not too difficult, not too grandiose, and not too complicated.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“In his book The Pursuit of Happiness, psychologist David Myers reviewed research on the relationship between money and happiness. He found that once personal income had reached a stable but rather modest level, more income didn’t make people any happier. Instead, what made people happy was more time with friends and family. He concluded that happiness often involves living a simple life, consuming less, and savoring more. He cited a study that found that the less expensive recreation is, the more people enjoy it. Americans actually rate themselves higher on happiness scales when they are gardening than when they are snow skiing or power boating.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“One of psychologist Martin Seligman’s early research projects involved giving students one of two assignments— they could do a good deed or they could give themselves a treat. He asked them to rate their happiness at the time and a week later. When the event occurred, the students who had done a good deed reported higher happiness scores. And a week later, these students felt even happier when they remembered their good deed than did the students who had indulged themselves. Seligman discovered that not only is philanthropic action more fun than doing something defined as pleasurable, but also that it has longer-lasting effects on happiness.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“We can be intentional in our decisions about vacations and leisure time. Before we make our decisions, we can explore questions like, How far from home will we travel? Shall we go by bike, car, train, or airplane? Do we have closer alternatives nearby? What kind of tourism and recreation do we want to support with our choices? Travel has always been a big source of pleasure for Jim and me and we have struggled to find the right balance between saving and savoring. Some of our happiest times have been traveling to festivals and parks. We still travel but we are experimenting with the staycation. One day a month, we go off the grid. We wake up and make one decision at a time about what we feel like doing. We don’t take phone calls or look at our computers. We don’t pay bills or do housework. We just enjoy whatever we feel like doing in our area.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Monique teaches her daughters the names of the trees, birds, wildflowers, and ornamental plants. She wants them to pay attention to the natural world, which will always be a solace to them, no matter what happens.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Monique said, "Not having to rush is the greatest luxury an American can experience these days.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Monique once told me, “It is the driven of the world who have the hardest lives. They don’t see their families or have time to enjoy a garden or a bedtime story. They may have money and prestige, but they are poor. True wealth for our family means the time to be patient and loving with each other, time to rest and play, and a sense that we are doing what we can to be good citizens of the earth.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Awareness is an important step in the healing process, but we need not feel conscious of our global problems all the time. Most of the time, we can live “as if” the world we know will long continue. Constructive awareness allows us to think about our global storm when we have an opportunity to make choices about our behavior.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“Working together, we were experiencing what Nelson Mandela called “the multiplication of courage.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“One example of this is the way the world community dealt with the hole in the ozone layer caused by fluorocarbons. This alarming problem, documented by solid evidence, had to be solved for life on earth to continue. And it was. In 1978, governments and businesses worked together to eliminate fluorocarbons in aerosol cans and other products. Today the hole in the ozone layer is disappearing. Scientists believe it will be back to its ideal level by midcentury. This happened because governments and corporations all over the world worked together to stop an impending catastrophe.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture

“W. S. Merwin . . . traced our attitude of dominion to the beginnings of agriculture. He argued that settling down in permanent places gave us the “illusion of possession.” That fateful moment in our hominid history set us up for our downfall.”
― Mary Pipher, The Green Boat: Reviving Ourselves in Our Capsized Culture