The Earth belongs not to us, we belong to the Earth.
For we are fed of its forest, clad in its wood, barqued by its bark and our lecture is its leave.
— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 389
This is the Day whereon the earth shall tell out her tidings.
— Bahá’u’lláh (Gleanings XVII)
Euro-American humanism has been a story of writers and scholars who were deeply moved and transformed by their immersion in earlier histories and literatures.… Today a new breed of posthumanists is investigating and experiencing the diverse little nations of the planet, coming to appreciate the “primitive,” and finding prehistory to be an ever-expanding field of richness. We get a glimmering of the depth of our ultimately single human root. Wild nature is inextricably in the weave of self and culture.… The dialogue to open next would be among all beings, toward a rhetoric of ecological relationships.
— Gary Snyder (1990, 68)
If we can see (as we once saw very well) that our conversation with the planet is reciprocal and mutually creative, then we cannot help but walk carefully in that field of meaning.
— David Suzuki (1997, 206)
The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.
— Thomas Berry (1999, 3)