This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We have become so preoccupied with power and control over nature that we have lost an important dimension of our being, the disposition of thankfulness, of commemoration, of perceiving and enjoying something for its own sake. Instead of viewing these immediate objects of our environment in terms of their own being, we have come to regard them solely in terms of what they are for us. And to such an exploitative mentality, nature’s own voice becomes mute. Approached as material merely, to be worked up and pressed into the service of a self-styled lord of creation, she contains no revelation and no blessing.
Control | Important | Lord | Nature | Power | Regard | Revelation | Self | Service | Thankfulness |
Learning, then controlling, is limited by only two things: by our mind’s capabilities and the constraints of the universe. Learning how to progressively exploit our environment will not stop until life itself ceases… life explores and exploits its inherited options.
Life learns how to exploit and control its environment by perceiving, investigating, understanding, then utilizing the relationships that exist between objects and events. This is possible because the universe is causally constructed.
Control | Events | Exploit | Life | Life | Understanding | Universe |
Living entails (and is inseparable from) exploiting the environment for resources. Exploiting therefore, at its roots, is constructive. Indeed, the exploitive ability of the creative has improved the quality of life for billions. We should never fear our exploitive nature, but we must manage its excesses.
The transformation from non-living to living requires two steps. First, environmental sources must provide the energy needed to add an atom or two (also taken from the environment) to a molecular complex. The second step, the process is reversed; the added atoms and energy have to be returned to the environment – otherwise nothing more than a chemical activity is occurring. Thus, right at life’s beginning, natural selection seems inevitable.
Beginning | Energy | Inevitable | Life | Life | Nothing | Right |
Thomas Lickona, fully Thomas Edward Lickona
Character doesn’t function in a vacuum; it functions in a social environment. Often that environment suppresses moral concerns.
The Law of Attraction attracts to you everything you need, according to the nature of your thought life. Your environment and financial condition are the perfect reflection of your habitual thinking. Thought rules the world.
Law | Life | Life | Nature | Need | Reflection | Thinking | Thought | World | Thought |
The adult works to perfect his environment, whereas the child works to perfect himself, using the environment as the means… The child is a being in a constant state of transformation.
A child has not yet been hypnotized by the world idea of limitation and lives naturally in harmony with its source. That is why most grown people love to be with children. They radiate the natural harmony of the Universe and that is the natural environment of man.
Children | Harmony | Love | Man | People | Universe | World | Child |
Bill Bradley, fully William Warren "Bill" Bradley
American environmental ills at home (smog, deforestation, the loss of wetlands), as well as the degradation of vast areas of the developing world remind us that protecting the environment is the ultimate enlightened self-interest.
Self | Self-interest | World | Loss |
Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger
The individual freedoms destroyed by the increase in national authority have been in the main the freedom to deny black Americans their elementary rights as citizens, the freedom to work little children in mills... the freedom to pay starvation wages... the freedom to... pollute the environment - all freedoms that, one supposes, a civilized country can readily do without
Authority | Children | Freedom | Individual | Little | Rights | Work |