Donella Meadows

What I hear every day on talk radio is America's lack of education - and I don't mean lack of college degrees. I mean lack of the basic art of democracy, the ability to seek the great truths that can come only by synthesizing the small truths possessed by each of us.

There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.

The leg system of the beach animals works because of a combination of certain lengths of tubes. Because of the proportion of lengths, the animals walk smoothly. You could say that this range of numbers is their genetic code.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.