The only real cure for provincialism is not dictated by our awareness of the size and diversity of the human family alone, but also by our awareness of the staggering size and diversity of the more-than-human community of nature.

George B. Handley - Home Waters, pg. 42

George Handley - Environmentalism rehabilitates humanity

Whatever environmentalism seeks to be, it must not denigrate the uniqueness of human experience.  This is because environmental degradation is itself our own suicidal impulse.  And this self-destructiveness is not only an indifference to beauty but an intolerance for the bald fact that we are subject to death and dying.  We need to rehabilitate what it means to be human.  We cannot risk self-hatred.

George B. Handley - Home Waters, pg. xvi

Happiness emerges from being fully sentient and fully alive, which only means that it comes with being a sufferer. Which raises the question: Is it a weakness to want happiness? In some categorical sense, the answer is obviously no. But it is if we want it like a drug, if we feel anger or betrayal when it slips from our hands, if we feel that it is something we can control or demand.

George Handley, "Patience in Suffering"

The more we know empirically about the world, the more faith has become necessary. This is true on the level of both microbiology and physics as well as on the intergalactic level of astronomy. Empirical knowledge of the workings and character of physical life only keeps providing more evidence of our inability to find the rock-bottom reality of our material existence. So while our senses tell us that we live in a world that renders us meaningless and insignificant and that seems to defy our best efforts to make it intelligible, as if it were being perpetually made by a God too busy spinning off his many life forms to pay attention to our puny human lives, ...and have the audacity, bordering on insanity, to believe that our actions matter, that we can and should act on the world’s behalf.

George Handley, "Biocentrism at Sea"