“Viewed as a resource that sustains our humanity, the earth is a collection of places.”

A place is a piece of the whole environment that has been claimed by feelings.

It is the sounds and smells and sights of places which haunt us and against which we often measure our present.

The catalyst that converts any physical location – any environment if you will – into a place, is the process of experiencing deeply.

Viewed simply as a life-support system, the earth is an environment.

We are homesick for places, we are reminded of places.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

I cannot accept the definition of collective good as articulated by a privileged minority in society, especially when that minority is in power.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.

They are essentially commitments and attitudes that foster collaboration and positive collective action.

How we navigate between false agreement and polarization is the kind of mastery that collective wisdom represents.

Collective wisdom is about our capacity to recognize interdependence and to make decisions demonstrating that we have a stake in each other, that we can indeed care for each other and the physical planet we share.

In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don’t really get freaked out.

We don’t work like the best basketball player and the best musician and so on. Science is a collective effort.