Quotes from Sage's recent reading and a new picture

I thought I needed a new photo. This one was taken after a few days in the bush. Also, what about those Tigers! They beat the best team money can buy, the Yankees. It's always like Christmas in my home when the Yankees get beat! Anyway, here are some quotes from this week's readings.

The Achilles’ heel of consumer society is that it hasn’t made us happy as it promised it would. Although Americans have tripled their prosperity since the mid 1950s, the percentage who say they’re “very satisfied” with their lives has declined. In face, only about a quarter of Americans now say that they’re “very satisfied,” When you think about it, this is pretty sad considering the unbelievable amount of resources and energy that we have consumed—and waste we have produced—in the last fifty years. “We’ve pursued the American Dream to no real apparent end.
- Bill McKibben in an interview by Alexis Adams, “Dream A Little Dream” The Sun (October 2006)

Community is as endangered by surplus as it is by deficit. There is too much money floating around it enables people to have no need of each other.
-Bill McKibben in an interview by Alexis Adams, “Dream A Little Dream” The Sun (October 2006)

Their schooling is more than mass hysteria. It has hydro-dynamic advantages. Like geese in their V formations, like bikers in a pack, the schools get along with less energy than if they were swimming alone… their individual oxygen consumption is lower when they are in school.
-John McPhee, The Founding Fish

My hypothesis is that what keeps these guys going further and further, when there are clear disadvantages of doing so has to be advantages for their progeny… to put your offering at the head of the food chain.
-John McPhee, The Founding Fish (On shad migration)

The very word canyon suggested to me protection, a dramatically confined place under the guard of impenetrable cliffs; walls drawn narrowly inward on both sides and a ribbon of sky above. It was a place that would hold me.
-Craig Child, Soul of Nowhere

If the rest of the Grand Canyon is made of rock, then the canyon of the Redwall are made of seduction.
-Craig Childs, Soul of Nowhere

I admire more than ever, the power and grace of your style, the vivid rendering of the physical scene—you manage to make even Michigan sound like a land of splendor and mystery.
-Edward Abbey in a letter to Jim Harrison (an author from Michigan) after reading his book Sun Dog. Abbey goes on to chastise Harrison for creating a hero out of an engineer/dam builder who works for a company like “Bechtel.” He follows this up with a rant on the damning impact of dams around the globe. Letter in The Sun, October 2006.