The Unsettlers Quotes

“I look at the trees and the birds and I know it’s not true. I’m not yet sure how to do it, but I’m going to learn.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“women chained in place with bike locks, leading their arresting officers in a round of “Amazing Grace.” “This is the manufactured division that keeps us separated,” Ethan told me. “And separation is the source of how we’re in this position.” What if he could re-create the joy and song and theater of the protesters but without a demonstration?”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Ethan left Seattle overjoyed by the celebration and unity he’d felt in the streets, but also disillusioned with the results. For all the careful organizing, the movement needed more training in nonviolence. “People were singing for peace,” he said. “But once the rubber bullets and concussion grenades started, they were hurling concrete at the police.” The protests reinforced the chasm between citizens and cops, perpetuating the model of a police state. Reporters had deepened the divide, focusing on the masked vandals instead of the elderly Quaker”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Ethan was inspired by Jerry Mander’s 1991 polemic In the Absence of the Sacred,”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment,” said Emerson,”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“C. S. Lewis wrote of temptation, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“We can, each of us, work to put our own inner house in order.” He viewed economics through a Buddhist lens, asserting that “the essence of civilization [is] not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“What can I actually do?” asked the British economist E. F. Schumacher in his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful, in the face of intractable tentacles of industry. “In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers,” he wrote, “modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man.” Meanwhile, the wealthy were stripping the world of its cheap fuels at such a quick rate that poor countries would never get a fair share.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“knew about chicken factories. I knew about the lightless cages, the clipped beaks, the overhead drizzle of shit, the poison-laced corn and soy shoved down their gullets, the farmers bullied into serfdom. I knew about growth hormones and preservatives and artificial flavors, the obscene categorization of body type by cooking method: fryer, broiler, roaster.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Here’s where my pastoral fantasy ran aground: the pound of organic butter cost six dollars and fifty cents. The ceiling for buying my way into grace was about five bucks.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“the “environment” is not a place we vacation to gaze at warblers, but our home, the one and only garden that feeds us. In”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“hadn’t the agrarian Wendell Berry written, “How could we divorce ourselves completely and yet responsibly from the technologies and powers that are destroying our planet? The answer is not yet thinkable.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Let me be clear: I felt bad about the state of the planet, and I was willing to pay extra if it supported an actual farmer instead of the bovine gulag.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“What I have never been able to tolerate is the prospect that my few years on earth will be frittered away filling out the form to verify that I filled out the previous form, or worse, toiling in the service of some enterprise that perpetuates the things I hate: war, corporate bullying, bureaucratic hoop-jumping, plunder of nature, and more hours tethered to electronic screens. I was willing to work, but I wanted my work to matter—to repair land and cities, to cultivate peace and justice.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“The deeper purpose of teaching gardening is connecting with nature: being whole human beings and really understanding our relationship with the rest of Creation”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“He lambasted warmongering conservatives “going to bible study 3 times a week . . . blessing the bombs we drop on women and children . . . and cursing the godlessness of this culture.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“The greatest conspiracy on the planet is that we need to oppress, kill, and pollute in order to get our needs met,”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also prison.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“find a balance between building a new world and helping to save the existing one.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Grumble as we might about Wall Street felons, we keep the banks in business by lending them our money, paying their interest on mortgages and credit cards, and amassing our savings in their IRAs and money-market accounts. Protest as we might about police killing unarmed black teenagers, white people have created segregated ghettoes by fleeing to “safe neighborhoods” where the public schools are good.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“Rail as we might against fracking and wars that protect our oil supply, we support those things with our gas furnaces, cars, and taxes. Grieve”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“In capitalist economies that require continuous increase in consumption, voluntary poverty constitutes a threat to power. What keeps the gears spinning is income that is both taxable and disposable.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“voluntary poverty had a long history in nearly all world cultures—from Buddha to Jesus to Mohammed to Saint Francis—yet was generally practiced only by monastics, who combine vows of poverty with vows of celibacy.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“The machine enslaves, the hand sets free.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“at the heart of permaculture lay a gorgeously empathetic view of human nature: people aren’t inherently wasteful and greedy, but fall into those patterns because of the temptations of the modern world.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“rocket mass heater, a homemade furnace so efficient that you can hold your open palm over the chimney. There’s no heat or smoke or pollution because everything gets burned. Whereas conventional furnaces gobble valuable resources like wood or gas, only to create waste in the form of smoke and escaped carbon, these devices transform waste into a valuable resource: heat.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“hugelkultur, a method of burying logs in earthen mounds as the basis for gardens, a nifty function-stacking that stores nutrients and moisture in the soil while sequestering the carbon of waste wood that might otherwise be burned.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“For eons, humans had transformed sunlight into food, through the growing of edible plants and animal feed. In recent decades all that changed. Modern industrial farming relied not on the sun but on fossil fuels, refined into pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, and the oil and gas needed to transport food hundreds of miles to market. Our farming system represented a net loss of energy. Whereas sunshine was infinite, oil would one day run out. In the meantime, the damage of industrial farming to the world’s soil might be irreversible.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“the wealth created by the reduction economy was not one of material things but of time.”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America

“I want to invite you to look at all your beliefs deeply and see if any are limiting you in any way,”
― Mark Sundeen, The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America