A Quote by Sven Birkerts

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril. — © Sven Birkerts
Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.
In 1966 Rolf Edberg wrote "This is mankind's home", "in the narrow borderland between the deathly heat beneath our feet and the coldness of space above us". He describes the fragility of our existence in poetic terms: "the atmospheric layer is so thin that it cannot be represented on any globe with even the finest brushstroke. At its thickest, it is only a few fractions of a millionth of the Earth's radius. This thin layer is what makes the difference between our planet and the sterile landscape of the moon." After reading that, one does feel the need to take better care of this fragile layer.
What's happening to our world? Imagine the year 2000 and our ozone layer has vanished... Our planet has a fever and she is burning up - what will you do?
Curiosity, that's what kills us. Not muggers or all that bullshit about the ozone layer. It's our own hearts and minds.
As a country, we have confronted and controlled the most common sources of ozone precursors, and our options are few and far between to handle what remains, which is mostly naturally occurring ozone and ozone transported from other countries such as Mexico.
Just like there's a hole in the ozone layer, there's a hole in the musical ecological layer [wrt lack of successful "conscious" music]... 'Traditional' music was brand new at one time... When you hear R&B today, do you believe it?
It is personal - deep in my bones and my flesh - the knowledge that we squandered our chance to avoid the climate emergency; to act when it would have been so much easier, as we did to stop acid rain, to save the ozone layer.
So I'm going to go on and work on preserving the ozone layer, encouraging everyone to recycle.
Global warming is a scientific fact as much as the hole in the ozone layer or Earth's orbit around the sun.
We don't have seasons anymore. You know why? We lost the ozone layer. Well, put it on milk cartons - let's find it!
The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment.
We're gonna do a Bowling for Dollars-type thing, but it'll be Breakdancing on Cardboard for Yen for the ozone layer, so it'll be called Breaking in Space.
All perfection is there already in the soul. But this perfection has been covered up by nature; layer after layer of nature is covering this purity of the soul.
This notion that man can, and should, have absolute dominion over the "chaotic" powers of nature and woman...is what ultimately lies behind man's famous "conquest of nature" - a conquest that is today puncturing holes in the earth's ozone layer, destroying our forests, polluting our air and water, and increasingly threatening the welfare, and even survival, of thousands of living species, including our own.
I think we learn slowly as a group, but we learn. The ozone layer is still there.
A living tree is a changing, sleeve shape, a wet, thin, bright green creature that survives in the thin layer between heartwood and bark. It stands waiting for light, which it catches in the close-woven sieves of its leaves.
Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.
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