Robyn Davidson Quotes

I believe very firmly that indigenous populations had a really good, intuitive understanding of why we're here. And we're trying to gain that same understanding through psychology and intellect in modern civilization.

For centuries, cultures throughout the world have used indigenous technologies to navigate life's complexities. From navigator-priests in Micronesia to mystics in India, vast sums of knowledge are available if we but recognize it.

One of India's major blessings is the rich store of experience and knowledge available in the rural and tribal areas.

To annihilate indigenous populations eventually paves the way to our own annihilation. They are the only people who practice sustainable living. We think they are relics of the past, but they may be the gatekeepers to our future.

The only true and effective "operator's manual for spaceship earth" is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.

In Africa, animals and the natural landscape allow local communities to support themselves, as there is a constant source of money from tourism.

You want to live in harmony with nature and with each other.

Our society is set up in a way that's so against the natural state of nature, and the way it's all initially intended to be. I kind of have to - not rebel, but peacefully rebel, in a sense - and do my part to protect it, regardless of the way that society is set up.

We have to be responsible towards the environment when we celebrate our festivals.

People can live in nature, and they won't necessarily destroy it.

I learned from my parents to revere nature. Their way of teaching my siblings and I to respect the environment was to be in it, and so we spent a great deal of time outdoors.

We need to pay our dues to live on this earth; we need to pay the rent, and I'm doing that with the work we are carrying out here in Patagonia.

It's great that we can, however subtly, offer important lessons through cartoons that it's important to protect the environment.

It's for us to take care of the air we breathe and the water we drink. And I do believe we have an impact on that, and we do have the ability to change it if we make the decision to.

We can try to gain some of the sensibility of some of the indigenous populations of the world or our predecessors 800 years ago. We can laugh at them as being naive and unsophisticated, but unless we can gain that sensibility that there has to be rights of nature as Bolivians and others put it, then we're going to be destroyed.

For me, it always comes back to the land, respecting the land, the wildlife, the plants, the rivers, mountains, and deserts, the absolute essential bedrock of our lives. This is the source of where my power lies, the source of where all our power lies. We are animal. We are Earth. We are water. We are a community of human beings living on this planet together. And we forget that. We become disconnected, we lose our center point of gravity, that stillness that allows us to listen to life on a deeper level and to meet each other in a fully authentic and present way.

The aboriginal peoples of Australia illustrate the conflict between technology and the natural world succinctly, by asking, 'What will you do when the clever men destroy your water?' That, in truth, is what the world is coming to.

Look at native cultures - they've lasted for tens of thousands of years, not doing everything right. We wouldn't want to emulate them in many ways, but their basic philosophies - being a part of nature, a part of a tribe or group without elevating, not what you call dominator philosophies - they lasted for tens of thousands of years. It took us to come and put them asunder.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

Our language, one of our most precious natural resources, deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes.

Virtually all native cultures that have survived without fouling their nests have acknowledged that nature knows best, and have had the humility to ask the bears and wolves and ravens and redwoods for guidance.

We need some contact with the things we sprang from. We need nature at least as a part of the context of our lives. Without cities we cannot be civilized. Without nature, without wilderness even, we are compelled to renounce an important part of our heritage.

Turn to your community and the great earth for sustenance and knowledge.

It may seem absurd to believe that a 'primitive' culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.

I would like to say, historically, from the very beginning, our people have time and again expressed the need for people to live in harmony with the creator, the mother earth, fellow man, and respect our brother's vision. In the past and the present, we have been respon-sible for the greatest gains; cultivated foods and medicines; democratic government, and many other areas of concern.