User Profile

Bij de geboorte was de levensverwachting in Holland 28 jaar. Om zo oud te worden moesten paar kritieke fasen worden doorstaan. Zo lag de kindersterfte hoog, waardoor maar liefst een vijfde van de kinderen de eerste vier levensjaren niet overleefde, wat de gemiddelde leeftijd natuurlijk behoorlijk naar beneden trok ... Wanneer iemand zijn eerste levensjaren voorbij was, dan volgde een nieuwe kwetsbare periode, als jongvolwassene tussen 20 en 30 jaar. Bijna de helft van de vrouwen overleed in die levensfase, bij de mannen ging het om iets minder dan een derde. In een tijd zonder medische kennis en zorg - en ons moderne besef van hygiëne - waren zwangerschappen en bevallingen voor vrouwen risicovolle periodes. Er kon van alles misgaan en de mensen moesten hopen dat het kind zonder ongelukken ter wereld zou komen. Jongvolwassen mannen liepen dergelijke risico's niet, maar vertoonden vaker risicovol gedrag. Ook moesten zij mee ten strijde trekken wanneer de landsheer besloot op oorlogspad te gaan. Bij bloedige gevechten vielen niet zelden honderden doden of meer. Andere doodsoorzaken waren vaak ziektes die voor ons niet meer zonder meer levensbedreigend zijn, zoals bijvoorbeeld griep, longontsteking, tetanus of bloedvergiftiging, maar waarvoor toentertijd nog geen behandelingen mogelijk waren, laat staan dat er vaccinaties bestonden. Bij benadering 20 procent van de bevolking wist een leeftijd boven de veertig te behalen, maar het was slechts een enkeling, ongeveer 1 procent, die de zestig haalde.

— Amsterdam, het water en de mensen by Gabri van Tussenbroek, Ranjith Jayasena (Page 65 - 66)

Bij de bierconsumptie moeten we ons overigens realiseren dat het alcoholpercentage destijds aanzienlijk lager lag dan tegenwoordig, al is het een hardnekkig misversatnd dat het bierdrinken - ook door kinderen - te maken zou hebben gehad met de slechte kwaliteit van het oppervlaktewater.

— Amsterdam, het water en de mensen by Gabri van Tussenbroek, Ranjith Jayasena

"... the refusal of so many environmentalists to consider responses to the climate crisis that would upend the economic status quo forces them to place their hopes in solutions—whether miracle products, or carbon markets, or “bridge fuels”—that are either so weak or so high-risk that entrusting them with our collective safety constitutes what can only be described as magical thinking."

— This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (45%)

“Imagine that someone came up with a brilliant new campaign against smoking. It would show graphic images of people dying of lung cancer followed by the punch line: ‘It’s easy to be healthy - smoke one less cigarette a month.’ We know without a moment’s reflection that this campaign would fail,” wrote British climate activist and author George Marshall. “The target is so ludicrous, and the disconnection between the images and the message is so great,that most smokers would just laugh it off.”

— This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

And yet still, at the upper echelons of the climate movement, our soaring emissions are never blamed on anything as concrete as the fossil fuel corporations that work furiously to block all serious attempts to regulate emissions, and certainly not on the economic model that demands that these companies put profit before the health of the natural systems upon which all life depends. Rather the villains are always vague and unthreatening—a lack of “political will,” a deficit of “ambition”—while fossil fuel executives are welcomed at U.N. climate summits as key “partners” in the quest for “climate solutions.”

— This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (Page 36)

A decade ago, Australian philosopher and professor of sustainability Glenn Albrecht set out to coin a term to capture the particular form of psychological distress that sets in when the homelands that we love and from which we take comfort are radically altered by extraction and industrialization, rendering them alienating and unfamiliar. He settled on “solastalgia,” with its evocations of solace, destruction, and pain, and defined the new word to mean, “the homesickness you have when you are still at home.” He explained that although this particular form of unease was once principally familiar to people who lived in sacrifice zones —lands decimated by open-pit mining, for instance, or clear-cut logging—it was fast becoming a universal human experience, with climate change creating a “new abnormal” wherever we happen to live.

— This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (30%)

Jean-Paul Sartre called fossil fuels 'capital bequeathed to mankind by other living beings'; they are quite literally the decayed remnants of long-dead life-forms ... [R]ather than a society of grave robbers, we need to become a society of life amplifiers, deriving energy directly from the elements that sustain life. It's time to let the dead rest.

— This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (32%)

Al Gore called climate change "an inconvenient truth", which he defined as an inescapable fact that we would prefer to ignore. Yet the truth about climate change is inconvenient only if we are satisfied with the status quo except for the small matter of warming temperatures. If however, we see the need for transformation quite apart from those warming temperatures, then the fact that our current road is headed toward a cliff is, in an odd way, convenient - because it tells us that we had better start making that sweeping turn, and fast.

— This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein (28%)

Diesel’s ambition was to produce a light, small (about the size of a contemporary sewing machine), cheap engine that would be bought by independent entrepreneurs (machinists, watchmakers, restaurant owners) and would enable extensive decentralization of industry, one of his great social dreams:

A decade later ... he promoted worker-run factories and dreamed about the age of honesty, justice, brotherhood peacefulness, compassion, and love, and saw workers’ cooperatives as beehives and the workers themselves as bees...

Diesel told his son that his “chief accomplishment is that I have solved the social question” (Diesel 1937, 395)—but his engines did not find their most important uses in small workshops but in heavy machinery, trucks, and locomotives, and, after World War II, in large tankers, bulk carriers, and con- tainer ships, helping to create the very opposite of Diesel’s vision, an unprec- edented concentration of mass-scale manufacturing and the inexpensive distribution of its products in a new global economy...

— Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil (Page 255)