Michael Dowd Quotes

[S]ocioeconomic trends: population, motor vehicles, fertilizer constumption, tourism, river dams, etc., ...are the drivers of biosphere collapse. ...These are ecodidal trends and... earth system collapse trends.

Denial gets a bad wrap, because denial is instinctual.

, , and... abrupt non-linear ... ... verified that even if every human being went extinct tonight, stopping emissions immediately, we'd still see 25 to 40 ft of sea level rise in the next two centuries.

I dedicate this book to the glory of God.

Homo colossus is Willam Catton's term for "industrial" humanity. That's where each of us uses 20-50 times the resources, and exudes 20-50 times the waste as Homo sapiens.

You will... find here effective ways to talk about evolution to any friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors who are biblical literalists or young earth creationists.

Unstoppable collapse... These extinction level tipping points... thresholds that are already in the rear view mirror. Loss of the world's ice... I consider Dahr Jamail's The End of Ice... my favorite book on climate change. If you only read one book on climate change this year, read that...

School textbooks, unfortunately, sometimes render science as dogmatic as any fundamentalist doctrine. In truth, science is quintessentially open to revision and discovery.

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.

Traditional religions have played crucial roles in fostering cooperation within each tribe, kingdom, and early nation—though not infrequently by provoking suspicion and enmity of those outside the group. ...[T]o fulfill their potentials in our postmodern world, each will have to harmonize its core doctrines with the evolutionary world view. ...[T]he evolutionary outlook bolsters their core teachings. Instead of an intrusion... a precious blessing.

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

[M]any... believers have rejected evolution because... [it] has been depicted as random, meaningless, mechanistic, and Godless. The growing edge of evolutionary thinking... points to a very different understanding... a... realistic picture of divine creativity. ...a Universe astonishingly ...suited for life and ...consciousness.

Discussing Thank God for Evolution! with those you care about will open new doors of possibility... and provide common ground where none existed before. This book is a perfect gift, not to convert others to your way of thinking but to converse... deeply and heartfully about those things that matter most.

[W]e chose to display on our van both a Jesus fish and a Darwin fish—kissing. A retired biology professor... laughed, "Oh great! Now you piss everyone off!"

[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.