## Metadata - Author: [[Mark Boyle]] - Full Title: The Way Home - Category: #books ## Highlights - I wondered if these birds’ greatest skill might be their unending ability to keep their needs simple. Theirs is not a culture of progress, but one of artistic survival. ([Location 348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=348)) - I was an environmentalist once too, back in the days when it was still more about defending wild places and the natural world against untrammelled human ambition, and less about carbon and something obscure called ‘sustainability’. It seemed to me, as I got older, that environmentalism was becoming preoccupied with taming these wild places – deserts, oceans, mountains – in order to harness green energy to fuel our way of life, and that of a small percentage of the world’s people in particular. Paul Kingsnorth, in his essay collection Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, describes modern environmentalism as ‘the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy’, and suggests that it seems to be moved these days by a strange sort of equation: ‘Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.’ So I gave up being an environmentalist – at least that kind – and moved out of the city and into the natural world. ([Location 869](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=869)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - You know that industrial capitalism is nearing the completion of its ultimate vision when people have to pay their neighbours to go for a walk with them. ([Location 1598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=1598)) - They say that if you feel you don’t have fifteen minutes to meditate each day, then you need to do an hour. ([Location 1779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=1779)) - The philosopher Alain de Botton has said that ‘True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.’ ([Location 2056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=2056)) - In nature those who thrive are those most in tune with their landscape, those most alive to the rhythm and pulse of life. It is not so much survival of the fittest as survival of those that fit in. ([Location 2258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=2258)) - My thinking has got slower. Just as carpenters always recommend measuring twice and cutting once, I’ve begun thinking twice and writing once. ([Location 2280](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=2280)) - As I sit in a cabin writing, I recall how, between 1811 and 1814, the actual Luddites rebelled against the wealthy industrialists and their powerful political friends who, at the time of the land enclosures, were obliterating the cottage economies which afforded the common people a familial, purposeful and pleasant life. By then the steam engine – what Carlyle called ‘Stygian forges with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge-hammers’ – was enabling one man to do the work it would have taken two or three hundred men to do only a decade earlier. This effectively reduced a once proud and independent class of skilled craftspeople who had worked in their rural cottages to, at best, wage slaves in an urban slum and, at worst, the unemployed in an urban slum. After a three-year resistance the industrialists eventually won, and the rest, as they say, is history. ([Location 2859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=2859)) - I grab my coat and go for a walk. Good to feel the wind in your hair. I need the elements. They help to keep me in my place, save me from any delusions of grandeur and remind me that I need to appease the gods of water, earth, wind and fire. ([Location 3369](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=3369)) - When some remote ancestor of ours invented the shovel, he became a giver: he could plant a tree. And when the axe was invented, he became a taker: he could chop it down. ([Location 3379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=3379)) - Both may give you sore arms, but there is a difference between a keyboard and a spade. A spade can still be made fairly simply. It doesn’t need constant energy to keep going. It can last a long time, if you treat it well, rather like your body. A keyboard and a spade are both products of an industrial economy, but not to the same extent, and they do not have the same purpose. One can exist independently, the other cannot. This might be a matter of degrees, but the degrees matter – and so does the intent. There’s another point too, though, and perhaps it is a more important one: nobody ever got addicted to a spade. ([Location 3414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=3414)) - I’ve read that ground-up eggshells, being high in calcium, can aid the regeneration of your teeth. ([Location 3443](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=3443)) - If you don’t make time for health, you have to make time for illness. ([Location 3455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=3455)) - I find it strange that, in a world where free speech is so coveted, what I long for most is the freedom to not have to speak. Aldo Leopold summed up my morning’s sentiments when he said, ‘Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map.’ ([Location 3588](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=3588)) - My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves. ([Location 3746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=3746)) - as Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in Human Scale, my wish became ‘to complexify, not simplify’. ([Location 3757](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=3757)) - (Krishnamurti once remarked that ‘it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society’). ([Location 3826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07FYGB4Y3&location=3826))