Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich -
Environment
Quotes
6 Sourced Quotes
View all Ivan Illich Quotes
Source
Report...
Inevitably modern technology has polarized society. It has polluted the
environment
. It has disabled very simple native abilities and made people dependent on objects... Like an automobile which makes the world inaccessible, when actually in Latin "automobile" means "using your feet to get somewhere." The automobile makes it unthinkable. I was recently told, "You're a liar!" when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. Every Spaniard in the sixteenth, seventeenth century did that. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning, but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.
Ivan Illich
Source
Report...
I will clarify a distinction that I consider fundamental to political ecology. I shall distinguish the
environment
as commons from the
environment
as resource. On our ability to make this particular distinction depends not only the construction of a sound theoretical ecology, but also — and more importantly — effective ecological jurisprudence.
Ivan Illich
Source
Report...
The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order: Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. Enclosure marked a radical change in the attitudes of society towards the
environment
. Before, in any juridical system, most of the
environment
had been considered as commons from which most people could draw most of their sustenance without needing to take recourse to the market. After enclosure, the
environment
became primarily a resource at the service of "enterprises" which, by organizing wage-labor, transformed nature into the goods and services on which the satisfaction of basic needs by consumers depends. This transformation is in the blind spot of political economy.
Ivan Illich
Source
Report...
Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their
environment
. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.
Ivan Illich
Source
Report...
Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an
environment
equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.
Ivan Illich
Source
Report...
Observations of the sickening effect of programmed
environments
show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed.
Ivan Illich
Quote of the day
Good authors, too, who once knew better words Now only use four-letter words Writing prose — Anything goes.
Cole Porter
Ivan Illich
Wikipedia
Born:
September 4, 1926
Died:
December 2, 2002
(aged 76)
More about Ivan Illich...
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes