Quotes for regenerators
Quotes are like lanterns on a hillside – guiding lights that remind me that this is a journey that millions of humans are already on.
I’ve started a collection of the ones that speak to me – and keep coming back to for inspiration.
On humans and “logic”…
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”Variously attributed to Einstein and Mark Twain
Guiding wisdom for regenerators and solutionishts
The human mind does not run on logic any more than a horse runs on petrol.
Rory Sutherland, in Alchemy
On changing human systems…
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
Richard Buckminster Fuller
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
“Successful innovation is the adoption of a new practice by a community…”
Denning and Dunham, The Innovator’s Way
“…Simple stocks and flows, plumbed together, create systems way too complicated and dynamically complex to figure out easily….
Leverage points are points of power….
Donella H. Meadows,. Thinking in Systems
Give me a few months or years and I’ll figure it out. And I know from bitter experience that, because they are so counterintuitive, when I do discover a system’s leverage points, hardly anybody will believe me.”
“Vision without systems thinking, ends up painting lovely pictures of the future with no deep understanding of the forces that must be mastered to move from here to there.”
Peter M. Senge, Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
On how we use language…
“…the truly unique feature of our language is … the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.”
Yuval Noah Harari, SAPIENS
On regeneration…
Inequality… is not an economic necessity: it is a design failure.
Kate Raworth, in Doughnut Economics
On global warming…
“There’s no difference between a climate denier and somebody who’s literate in climate change and doesn’t do anything.”
Paul Hawken
“If I tell you what you ‘should’ do, you should RUN.
Paul Hawken, founder of Project Drawdown
Do what lights you up! Do what turns you on!”
“While we were finishing the book [DRAWDOWN] I spoke with three of the best-known international climate change experts—professors and authors who have been leading this field for the past 25-30 years. I asked them to write down their top-5 solutions for global warming. It took them a long time.
Moreover: They were all wrong. Their top solutions are not the top solutions according to the data of the leading institutions as we have researched those.Here’s my point: We are 40 years into global warming. It is the most serious problem humanity has ever faced. We have created it and the authorities in the field cannot name the top-5 solutions. That’s an astonishing anthropological fact. There is no plan…” (emphasis added)
Paul Hawken in The Optimist Daily
The IPCC has 2.5 billion data points behind the last assessment – the fifth assessment. It is the most astounding problem statement that humanity has ever created…Extraordinary!
But you don’t solve a problem by repeating the problem over and over again to each other. You solve a problem by looking at the possibilities that are inherent in that problem. That’s what Drawdown is about.
.Paul Hawken, University of Queensland 2018
Importance of images…
Half of the nerve fibres in our brains are linked to our vision and, when our eyes are open, vision accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity in the brain. It takes just 150 milliseconds for the brain to recognise an image and a mere 100 milliseconds more to attach a meaning to it.
Raworth, Kate. Doughnut Economics (p. 11)
