Becoming a LUMESian in 4 quotes

At my university, I was struck by how many of the other environmental students had had transformative, almost quasi-religious, experiences in nature when they were younger. I've been wondering if this was unique to my culture or more universal. I really want to know Why do we all care? Why are we all spending two years of our lives here in Lund trying to figure out how to change the world? Because maybe if we knew why us, we could spread whatever pushed us here to others.

"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no child-hood in it..."
--Georg Eliot (The Mill on the Floss)

This is why I became an environmentalist. I would never have loved the earth this much if it weren't for the idle times as a child climbing trees, building snow forts, racing margarine cups down the rivuleting floods of spring, jumping into leaf piles and floating in the ocean. I would not have loved this earth so much if I had not spent so many hours wandering the woods with my mom, as she asked me, What do you think that is? Why do you think it does that? Where is it going? Where does it live? The woods seemed full of stories and magic, and in the end, I loved the earth.

"Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent."
-- Rachel Carson (on why she wrote Silent Spring)

I started out as one of those serious kids who hears about the rainforests being cut down and the whales being endangered in school and demands it all to just stop! When I started taking classes on "environmental issues" and it all became so much more complicated, I felt like Carson, that I couldn't look away.

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds."
-- Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

So often it seems like it would be easier to look away, to not know the things they're telling us about global warming and desertification and poverty and biodiversity loss and on and on - to be able to have the future peace Carson knows she can't have because she knows so much. This, ultimately, is how I think I ended up here in Lund with y'all: to not live alone with this. To not become one of the burned-out American activists who are stuck and given up with the world. Sometimes it means so much just to see you all in class each day.

This brings me to another of my favorite quotes:

"To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts unexpressed, that can make this life a garden."
-- Goethe

Not to get completely mushy on y'all, but I think it means you are all flowers.