“The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship. This culture doesn't just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an ecological serial killer, and it's long past time for us to recognize the pattern.”
“Dominator culture teaches all of us that the core of our identity is defined by the will to dominate and control others. We are taught that this will to dominate is more biologically hardwired in males than in females. In actuality, dominator culture teaches us that we are all natural-born killers but that males are more able to realize the predator role. In the dominator model the pursuit of external power, the ability to manipulate and control others, is what matters most. When culture is based on a dominator model, not only will it be violent but it will frame all relationships as power struggles.”
“Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic scientist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.”
“I see no real evolution in media ecology beyond the “shape shifting” nature that seems to have been deliberately embedded in its fabric. The one thing that must, I think, always define a study we recognize as media ecological is its acknowledgement of the interactions of cultures – and the people who constitute those cultures – and their technologies.”
“This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture -civilization- is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living thing.”
“The practice of invoking the myths and cultural practices of native cultures to give moral support to practices within our current culture is an increasingly common phenomenon. Thus, many people cite the example of native cultures to defend their habit of meat-eating. The act of wrenching a narrative out of the context of one culture and grafting it onto another is not only disrespectful and self-serving, it is an act of violence in its own right.”