Quote of the Day: Ray Anderson on Flight
by Jasmin Malik Chua, Jersey City, USA 
on 08.26.07
Drawing the metaphor of the early attempts to fly. The man going off of a very high cliff in his airplane, with the wings flapping, and the guys flapping the wings and the wind is in his face, and this poor fool thinks he's flying, but, in fact, he's in free fall, and he just doesn't know it yet because the ground is so far away, but, of course, the craft is doomed to crash.
That's the way our civilization is, the very high cliff represents the virtually unlimited resources we seem to have when we began this journey. The craft isn't flying because it's not built according to the laws of aerodynamics and it's subject to the law of gravity.
Our civilization is not flying because it's not built according to the laws of aerodynamics for civilizations that would fly. And, of course, the ground is still a long way away, but some people have seen that ground rushing up sooner than the rest of us have.
The visionaries have seen it and have told us it's coming. There's not a single scientific, peer-reviewed paper published in the last 25 years that would contradict this scenario: every living system of earth is in decline, every life support system of earth is in decline, and these together constitute the biosphere, the biosphere that supports and nurtures all of life, and not just our life but perhaps 30 million other species that share this planet with us."
—Ray Anderson, founder of Interface, The Corporation
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I'm pretty sure that this quote is pulled from the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (published in 1992) and worded differently. I do love this quote, but when I first heard it in The Corporation I thought it sounded very familiar. Perhaps Ray Anderson said it first, but I very seriously doubt it.
Anyway, great quote - If I could confirm my conviction I would implore you to give credit where credit is due, but I have long since passed on my copy of Ishmael, a book that, I think, any individual hoping to become more "green" should read as soon as possible.
And sadly, just as gov't efforts (or the lack thereof) failed the Yangtze River dolphin in China (along with scads of other extinct animals), sometimes knowledge just isn't enough. Getting people to truly move, to really change, is a difficult thing.
Uh, we're probably screwed :
Think Apollo 13, needing to get back from the moon after their explosion. Think of how inventive Germany was, when blockaded in World War 2. Humanity is capable of a lot, when they have to be. But we're bad (as this article points out) when the deadlines are far away, and not discernable. The house needs to literally be on fire before we rouse from our beds.
This is paraphrased from Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn.
Ray Anderson does indeed give credit for his paraphrasing of the metaphor in Ishmael: http://www.interfaceinc.com/getting_there/Ray.html