Michael Dowd Quotes

Any measurement, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide... We're losing all of the ice of the world... The oceans, the plankton, the corals, the fish, , oceanic dead zones and deoxygenation... and , the amount of soil, the fertility of the soil, the moisture of the soil, and permafrost is releasing tons of methane... unstoppable.

At any measuere, absolutely everything that humans rely on... is now in precipitous free fall, unstoppable.

[L]et me slip into pride or arrogance, deception or inauthenticity, blame or resentment, or stingy, ungrateful self-centeredness, and I won't have to worry about burning in some otherworldly hell after I die. I'll be supping with Satan right here and now.

[T]he fact that our Universe has been transforming along a discernible path for billions of years—the fact that creation was not a one-time event—is of little or no dispute. ...[T]his undeniable fact ...makes me want to shout from the mountaintops: "...The war is over!"

We all have denial instincts... so we... can have compassion for ourselves and for each other... [D]enial often gets a bad wrap. It's often just adaptive inattention.

When most of the ice is gone, the serious global warming begins. ...[L]earn about phase change and ... [W]hen you've got a glass of water, as long as the ice is in there, even if the sun's beating on it, it stays at 32°. Once the ice is gone the temperature goes skyrocketing!

Denial is also the instinctual impulse to reject or discount information that calls into question our hopes, assumptions, or expectations about the future.

[F]or... over 99 percent of human history—there is little evidence that any culture understood developmental time and space... remotely similar to... today. Nevertheless, the big cosmological questions demanded answers, and so the answers came. ...Orally transmitted stories would evolve—until (and if!) they were written down and declared to be the unchanging revelation of God. When a story becomes scripture, it ceases to evolve.

The stability of the biosphere has been in decline for centuries and in unstoppable collapse for decades. This "Great Acceleration" of technology and market-driven ecocide is an easily verifiable fact... [A]ll you have to do is Google "Great Acceleration."

I wrote Thank God for Evolution! mostly to help religious believers from different traditions move toward an evidential worldview without having to abandon their tradition and join the atheist/humanist camp to do so. ...Few things are more important... than for... of religious believers... to embrace a science-based understanding of the world. ...Trying to understand reality without an evolutionary worldview is like trying to understand infection without microscopes or the structure of the universe without telescopes. It's... impossible.

The 's health has been in decline for one or two centuries, and in runaway collapse... for decades... The Great Acceleration of Gaian Collapse.

[M]y intent is to help you see what I see—science and religion can be mutually enriching.

I met Connie Barlow at a lecture... Connie was the author of four books, and two of them had "evolution" in their titles... She, too, was a long-time "epic of evolution" enthusiast. ...[H]er passion for sharing a sacred understanding of cosmic history was no less than mine. Seven months later I asked Connie to marry me.

[H]opium is a comforting vision of the future that requires breaking the laws of physics, biology or ecology, such as thinking that we can slow, stop or reverse The Great Acceleration of Gaian Collapse.

[P]aradoxically, "hope-free" collapse acceptance may be the only thing that can help us not make a bad situation worse—and live fully, fearlessly, and deeply meaningfully, even at TEOTWAWKI.