laws of nature...rule all.

"The Lie of progress. The Lie of unlimited expansion. The Lie of ‘grow-or-perish.’ Listen. We built ourselves a fine commercial bonfire, but then instead of basking in its warmth, toasting marshmallows over it, and reading the classics by its light, we became obsessed with making it bigger and hotter, bigger and hotter, until if the flames didn’t leap higher from one quarter to the next, it was cause for great worry and dissatisfaction. Well, any Bozo on the riverbank could have told us that if you keep feeding and feeding and feeding a bonfire, sooner or later you burn up all the fuel and the fire goes cold; or else the fire gets too huge to manage and eventually engulfs the countryside and chars its inhabitants. Nature has always set limits on growth: limits on the physical size of individual species, limits on the size of populations. Did we really believe capitalism was exempt from the laws of nature? Did we really confuse endless consumption with endless progress? Benjamin DeCasseres, a Frenchman who lectured at Timbuk U., defined progress as ‘the victory of laughter over dogma.’ Now there’s a victory worth celebrating."

—Larry Diamond (from Tom Robbins’ Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas)