Robert Pogue Harrison

“When I’m critical of modern approaches to ecology, I’m really trying to remind my reader of the long relationship that Western civilization has had to these forests that define the fringe of its place of habitation, and that this relationship is one that has a rich history of symbolism and imagination and myth and literature. So much of the Western imagination has projected itself into this space that when you lose a forest, you’re losing more than just the natural phenomenon or biodiversity; you’re also losing the great strongholds of cultural memory.(Source: discussing "Deforestation in a Civilized World.")”

“Irony that does not deem itself ironic is the most dangerous irony of all.”

“And nothing . . . disquiets a rationalist more than a forest.”

“Soul and habitat--we are finally in a position to know this--are correlates of one another.”

“Decadence begins with the loss of restraint.”

“The destructive impulse with respect to nature all too often has psychological causes that go beyond the greed for material resource or the need to domesticate an environment. There is too often a deliberate rage and vengefulness at work in the assault on nature and its species, as if one would project onto the natural world the intolerable anxieties of finitude which hold humanity hostage to death. ”

“Walls protect, divide, distinguish; above all they abstract. The basic activities that sustain life . . . take place beyond walls.”

“Walls, no less than writing, define civilization. They are monuments of resistance against time, like writing itself. . .”

“Human beings, in other words, are always already dead. This proleptic knowledge of finitude predetermines their most creative as well as their most destructive dispositions.”

“If nothing else, a house is a place to keep books in.”

“Our basic human institutions - religion, matrimony, and burial, also law, language, literature, and whatever else relies on the transmission of legacy - are authored, always and from the very start, by those who cam before. The awareness of death that defines human nature is inseparable from - indeed, it arises from, our awareness that we are not self-authored, that we follow in the footsteps of the dead. . . .Nonhuman species obey the law of vitality, but humanity in its distinctive features is through and through necrocratic. Whether we are conscious of it or not we do the will of the ancestors; their precedents are our law; we submit to their dictates, even when we rebel against them. Our diligence, hardihood, rectitude, and heroism, but also our folly, spite, rancor, and pathologies, are so many signatures of the dead on the contracts that seal our identities. We inherit their obsessions; assume their burdens; carry on their causes; promote their mentalities, ideologies, and very often their superstitions; and often we die trying to vindicate their humiliations.Why this servitude? We have no choice. Only the dead can grant us legitimacy. Left to ourselves we all bastards.”