Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
Alice WalkerRead
The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the vital role that animals play in our ecosystem and spiritual well-being.
Alice Walker highlights the urgent need to protect animal life, suggesting that the disappearance of animals would lead to a profound loss not just in biodiversity, but also in the spiritual and emotional richness of human existence. She draws an analogy between the importance of free animal life and the necessity of oxygen, indicating that both are essential for the health of our planet and our souls.
In practice
During a conservation seminar where we discuss the importance of biodiversity.
Animals can communicate quite well. And they do. And generally speaking, they are ignored
June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
I think 'The Color Purple' is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
One white man on the platform in South Carolina asked us where we were going--we had got off the train to get some fresh air and to dust the grit and dust out of our clothes. When we said Africa he looked offended and tickled too. Niggers going to Africa, he said to his wife. Now I have seen everything.
Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere.
Perhaps the single most important thing that we can do to undo the harm we have done is to fix firmly in our minds the thought: the earth is alive.
It was a cold day but the sun was out and the trees were like great bonfires against gray distant fields and hills.
Those trees are your lungs. The earth recycles as your body. The rivers recycle as your circulation. The air is your breath. So what do we call the environment?
Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor or hermit.
If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
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