This post includes quotes and summaries of some books I’ve read that I thought are really meaningful and insightful. Kind of random, kind of thoughtful. I’ve been developing this over the past months and think it might be useful mostly for myself in the future. Tag along if you like and read this if you think this is interesting. I’ll probably keep adding to this as I see fit, but this is what I have for now:

Earth In Mind by David Orr English Reading Assignment Quotes:

1. “Modern societies are increasingly operated by and for that subsystem known as the economy, … as Lewis Mumford once observed, converted the seven deadly sins of pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust into virtues after a fashion and the seven virtues of faith, charity, hope, prudence, religion, fortitude, and temperance into sins against gross national product… People lacking a sense of community that undergirds the practice of virtue are not likely to care how their actions affect the larger world in any but the most superficial way” (pg. 62).

1. This passage offers the view that the economy that controls our modern society has created a culture that has converted actions that were considered sins in the past into accepted behaviors and actions that were considered virtues in the past into attacks against economic growth. The author criticizes this culture by saying that if people are lacking a community that strongly values behavior having a high moral standard, they will not consider the consequences their actions might have and will make bad decisions. Thus, Orr wishes to change this culture because having a society where people are ignorant of what’s important and are making bad decisions because they don’t understand what’s right is not good. Changing this culture would be helpful because we would gain more intelligent people who are ethical and actually care to contribute to improving the environment and they would have a different perspective of things that might make them change their behavior. This is sort of different from my own culture because I was brought up in an environment where people made ethical environmental decisions and both of my parents come from a background that valued good moral behavior and had to care about the effects of their actions. However, there are still a lot of people I know/grew up with that don’t have the same opinion or view as I do and value things differently.
2. “Daly and Cobb believe that economies should serve communities rather than elusive and mythical goals of economic growth…We have accepted the radical inversion of purposes by which society is shaped to fit the economy instead of the economy being tailored to fit the society….We are increasingly offered fantasy for reality, junk for quality, convenience for self-reliance, consumption for community, and stuff rather than spirit. Business spends $120 billion each year to convince us that this is good, while virtually nothing is spent informing us what other alternatives we have or what we have lost in the process… Our economy…is neither sustainable or sustaining.”(pg. 167/168).

2. Does this passage relate to the central idea discussed in the book? What issues or ideas does the author explore? Are they personal, sociological, global, political, economic, spiritual, medical, or scientific?
The central idea in the book is that we are failing to create an educational system that properly teaches students and the next generation about the natural world and that human domination and modernization have had uncalculated consequences leading to the destruction of the environment and other major problems in the world today. This excerpt relates to the main idea because it emphasizes that the modern economy should focus more on strengthening the community and helping the people and society. It shouldn’t be centered around the goal of economic growth because it causes communities to become less self-reliant and independent, and it strips away human needs by not focusing on the true demands of the people. This issue is an economic, sociological, and political issue. For our society and consumerist culture to change, we would have to change the structure of how all three of these branches operate and educate with more community and environmentally minded values to build a more sustainable future.

3. “I am proposing that we aim to fit the values and loyalties of students to specific places before we equip them to change the world. I propose that we give students a stronger reason to want to know while making them more trustworthy in the use of technology. I am proposing that we make them accountable in small things before giving them the keys to the creation” (pg. 97).

3. Does this passage capture an issue that affects your life? How so—directly, on a daily basis, or more generally? Now or sometime in the future?
This passage captures the issue of students not being ready for living maturely and responsibly in a world where there are many important problems that we have to manage carefully. It infers that students should know how to properly handle technology and have integrity in doing smaller, less significant tasks before they are responsible for doing larger, more important things. This affects my life now on a general scale because as a high schooler in a generation where technology is more available and heavily used than ever, it is easy to become overdependent on technology and use it in the wrong way. And in the future, as we high schoolers grow older, bad habits can turn into greed and neglection. This is dangerous because people lose the sense of what’s right and often negatively affect other things like the environment without knowing. People need to learn to be accountable for their actions and know the consequences of what they are doing. If people of my age are not educated about this, it will affect future generations.
4. “The environmental movement has grown out of the efforts of courageous people to preserve and protect particular places: John Muir and Hetch-Hetchy, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and the Everglades, Horace Kephart and the establishment of the Great Smokies National Park. Virtually all environmental activists, even those whose work is focused on global issues, were shaped early on by a relation to a specific place. What Rachel Carson once called the “sense of wonder” begins in the childhood response to a place that exerts a magical effect on the ecological imagination. And without such experiences, few have ever become ardent and articulate defenders of nature.” (pg. 161).

4. Does this passage contain evidence that the author uses to support the book’s ideas? Is the evidence convincing, definitive, or speculative? Does the author depend on personal opinion, observation, and experience? Or is the evidence factual—based on science, statistics, historical documents, or quotations from (credible) experts?
In this passage, Orr makes a point that the environmental movement started because of people’s attachment to particular places and their desire to protect them. The larger message that the book portrays is that we need to literally keep the earth in our minds and be more ecologically literate and conscious by identifying the things that separate us from nature and try to move away from them towards a more intelligent and sustainable society. He uses evidence in the quote to support this larger theme because he gives examples of people who were leaders in the environmental movement and the places they protected. He then explains that even people who focused on global issues had some relation to a place. He also validated his argument by citing a concept from a book that Rachel Carson, a key conservationist and figure in the environmental movement wrote, pointing out that defending nature requires a “sense of wonder”. This evidence is convincing and depends on some personal opinion and observation but also references the writing of a credible expert. It makes sense because most people won’t do much to protect something unless it personally affects them. But experiencing a certain place in nature sparks a sense of awe that causes people to be emotionally attached. This will likely motivate them to be more ecologically considerate and take action to protect nature.

5. “ Looking ahead, we see the threats of biotic impoverishment, changing climate, and overpopulation. In the light of such prospects, it is understandable that many find it easier and safer to tidy things up rather than roll up their sleeves to turn these trends around… We are not likely to fight to save what we do not love. This means that biophilia must become a conscious part of what we do and how we think, including how we do science and how we educate people to think in all fields” (pg. 45/46).

5. What kind of language does the author use in this passage? Is it objective and dispassionate? Or passionate and earnest? Is it polemical, inflammatory, sarcastic? Does the language help or undercut the author’s premise?
The language the Orr uses in this passage is sensible and realistic because Orr suggests that some of the problems humanity will be facing in the future will be difficult to tackle and people won’t want to step up and confront them if they can’t appreciate what’s being affected. He urges the reader that it is important to reform the way we think about the natural world and ensure that people care about the environment and can make connections to it (biophilia). In this case, the language supports Orr’s claim because Orr provides a reasonable approach to think of things differently to solve the issues he mentioned while keeping an urgent tone. By using this tone, the author gives the reader certainty that what he proposes is legitimate.

6. “A third reason why we have ignored full costs has to do with the agricultural policies that defer ecological and social debts to a future electorate. This is not an abstract impersonal process but a failure of political leadership and of particular presidents, senators, congress represenatives, and secretaries of agriculture who have failed to concern themselves with long-term costs of the present food system. Instead they ahve followed the path of least resistance, which means a policy of chheap food and cheap energy for which we will pay dearly in the long run”(pg. 180).

6. What are the implications for the future – based on this segment of the text? Are there long- or short-term consequences to the issues raised in the book? Are they positive or negative…affirming or frightening?
This text implicates that our leadership and government executives have been too soft on setting policies and that if we keep ignoring the long-term costs and issues in the food system, it will keep getting worse and healthy ecology of farming will become depleted. Consequences to the long-term issues of messed up agricultural systems, fewer family farms, and not enough policy and regulation will include worse food quality, broken rural communities, urban sprawl and too much corporate control of the farming sector. These issues are unsettling because if farming is over-controlled by the government, people will lose the power to know the food that they’re eating. The public needs to be able to have a variety of options and producers in the market to choose from, or else there will be no way of really knowing if food is healthy or not.

7. “What are the dangers of education? There are three that are particularly consequential for the way we live on the earth: (I) that formal education will cause students to worry about how to make a living before they know who they are, (2) that it will render students narrow technicians who are morally sterile, and (3) that it will deaden their sense of wonder for the created world ”(pg. 24).

7. Does your selected passage contain controversial issues raised in the book as a whole? Who is aligned on which sides of the issues? Where do you fall in that line- up?
This passage contains the controversial issues that education can be dangerous because it causes students to worry about getting a job before they find a true passion they want to pursue in a career, it makes students good at fitting into a discipline but doesn’t teach them the importance of being ethical, and it makes them not appreciate the natural world. One one side of this issue may be environmentalists and people who may not have had a perfect experience in the education system. On the other side may be high-level educators and the corporate companies that are funding and benefitting from the education system. I support Orr because the education system does not give enough lessons on practical issues and getting students involved in solving real-world problems. It also doesn’t explore students’ interests enough so that they can make the best out of their educational experience. Lastly, the education system doesn’t give people who are struggling or ahead enough resources to learn at their level, which can result in uninterested students who don’t feel motivated to do what they’re capable of.
8. “Is mass biophobia a kind of collective madness? I think in time we will come to know that it is. Biophobia is not OK because it is the foundation for a politics of domination and exploitation. For our politics to work as they now do, a large number of people must not like any nature that cannot be repackaged and sold back to them ….. The drift toward a biophobic society, as George Orwell and C.S. Lewis foresaw decades ago, requires the replacement of nature and human nature by technology and the replacement of real democracy by a technological tyranny now looming on the horizon.”(pg. 136)

8. In response to your passage, what have you learned? Has it broadened your perspective about a difficult issue—personal or societal? Has it introduced you to a culture in another country…or an ethnic or regional culture in your own country?
After reading this passage, I learned that biophobia (the fear of nature) negatively affects modern society and is one of the driving forces of a lot of flawed habits and behaviors that lead to the destruction of nature and other problems. The passage was enlightening because Orr revealed that we are moving in the direction of a society where everything is controlled by technology and we will become entirely dependent on it to live. This made me realize that our culture is becoming less integrated with nature and we are exploiting it more for economic interests than we ever did. Fewer people are able to see the value of preserving the natural world and using traditional methods and are instead resorting to the more convenient and familiar use of technology. For example, people destroy rare forests worldwide for wood and profits, mine land for coal and oil and deplete water and soils to name a few. This proves why it’s important to educate people to live sustainably and love nature so that they can value its presence and protect it so it lasts.

9. “For real hope, as distinguished from wishful thinking, we ought not look first to our technological cleverness or abstractions about progress of one kind or another, but rather to the extent and depth of our affections, which set boundaries on what we do and direct our intelligence to better or worse possiblities. The possibility of affection for our children, place, posterity, and life is in all of us. It is part of our evolutionary heritage. It is embedded in our best religious teachings. And it is now a matter of simple self-interest that we come to realize the full extent of the obligations that arise from an alert, thorough and farsighted affection”(pg. XIV Introduction).

9. Does this passage capture an issue that affects your life? How so—directly, on a daily basis, or more generally? Now or sometime in the future?
This passage captures the issues of biophilia, ecological intelligence, and the importance of loving life so that we can save it. This affects my life because whenever I go out in nature, I have a feeling of relaxation, calm and understanding that I can’t get anywhere else. Going in nature is not only a necessary asset to being able to have biophilia. I believe it is something that everyone should do because it has unprecedented mental benefits and is an experience you truly can’t miss whether or not you’re solving important real-world issues.

10. “A strategy of comedy, I think, offers our best hope in hard times… Instead of being driven by fear in the mad and vain scramble for safety and security, we might see others as fellow passengers in this fragile craft called civilization. There are legitimate grounds for hope in hard times, but not one speck of ground for wishful thinking of any kind. We won’t be rescued by more research, hypertechnology, or some deus ex machina. There is no anonymous “they” who will figure things out. No calvalry will ride over the hill to rescue this wagon train…. Optimism cannot be commanded , as Frankl observed, but hope can be nurtured by doing good work, being open to life, and rising above our lesser selves. Hope, real hope, comes from doing the things before us that need to be done in the spirit of thankfulness and celebration, without worrying about whether we will win or lose.”(pg. 109/110).

10. What are the implications for the future – based on this segment of the text? Are there long- or short-term consequences to the issues raised in the book? Are they positive or negative…affirming or frightening?
This quote implicates that in the face of climate change, environmental destruction, and the slow collapse of civilization possibly looming in the future, nobody is going to save us; our best hope may be to remain positive by stepping up, trying our best to be our better selves and doing what’s necessary to make things right. The consequences of the issues of ecological illiteracy, ignorance, over-emphasis on the economy, and miseducation will be seen both in the short-term and in the long-term and are being seen now. However, our actions now are the most important because depending on what we do, the future could turn out either way. These implications are both frightening and expected because it’s scary to think about the future and what could go wrong, but it is important that we talk about these issues so that we can take action and have a realistic idea of what’s possible so that the worst doesn’t happen.

Food Fight by McKay Jenkins book summary and quote explanations:

Today, nearly all of our calories – that is to say, nearly all of our food – are grown from genetically modified plants. Chances are that three-quarters of everything you’ve put in your mouth today… were processed (or fed) from plants grown from seeds engineered in a laboratory. (page 3)

To see how much genetically modified and produced food has impacted the percentage of things we consume is crazy. Most people don’t even know what they’re eating or that 75% of the stuff they’re eating was engineered in a lab.

The reason for this is simple: The American diet is composed of almost entirely of processed foods that are made from two plants – corn and soybeans (and canola, if you want your food fried). (page 4)

This concentration of the food system and extreme uniformity in the ingredients put into the things we eat has a lot of implications.

Fully 85 percent of the feed given to cattle, hogs, and chickens is grown from genetically modified crops. There’s more: About half of the sugar we consume is grown from engineered sugar beets. (page 4)

We’re making animals eat the same as us too. Basically the same ingredients/GMOs, just in another animal when consuming meat.

“GMOs,” represent either a great stride forward in the history of food production or are part of a destructive and dangerous system that allows global food companies to radically damage our land and water, control the way we eat, and flood our bodies with unhealthy food. (pages 50-51)

It’s crazy to think of the scale that this technology, as well as others, has changed and affected our food system, consumption of resources and the land, the environment and a lot of other things. For the better or the worse, you could argue an agricultural revolution has happened.

Childhood blindness in Asia, insect infestations in Africa, famines caused by typhoons in the Indian subcontinent: all are problems being addressed by GMO researchers around the world. But it is also true that the giant agrochemical companies that produce the vast majority of the world’s GMOs… are far more interested in creating billion-dollar products for the American consumer market than they are in developing products… that people in the developing world actually eat. (page 5)

When digging deeper into these issues, the author reveals that the chemical companies spraying these crops are often the very companies producing GMOs on a large scale. So you can imagine that might create some issues considering their motives are not the same motives GMO researchers have and the things they create and grow are not the same that GMO researchers want for people or are trying to create for people.

Just one-half of 1 percent of American food exports actually goes to developing countries with dire food needs, a recent study by the Environmental Working Group shows. Fully 86 percent goes to wealthy, highly developed countries. (page 5)

I wonder if what they say they are worried about is actually true. If this statistic is accurate, then we have some very hypocritical people telling us about our food and should try to look more at the facts and read books like these to learn more about how we can actually make a difference on the quality of food in people’s lives as communities aroud the world.

Nationwide, monarch populations are down by 96 percent. So when companies say GMOs are necessary to “feed a starving world,” the slogan can sound empty, cynical, a bait and switch. (page 6)

This is just sad. This shows that there is definitely a dark side to how our food is produced and reveals the negative affects pesticides and herbicides and other industrial food processes have on the environment. I’m sure ContamiNation: My Quest to Survive in a Toxic World (also by McKay Jenkins) and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson greatly illustrate this.

In 2009, the top six agrochemical companies (Monsanto, DuPont, and Down, plus Syngenta, Bayer, and BASF) earned a combined $27.4 billion in seed sales and $44.4 billion in chemical sales… control two-thirds of the world’s agrochemical market… By 2019… expected to reach a value of $261 billion. (page 7)

These companies are clearly very wealthy and treat the production of our food like what it sounds like – a product – not like living organisms that are also crucial nutrients for us to consume.

My last book, ContamiNation, examined similar questions about the toxic chemicals found in everyday consumer products. Big-box stores are full of things…made from some 80,000 different petrochemicals, and of these, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a full set of toxicity information for just 7 percent. Despite frightening spikes in everything from cancer rates to autism, endocrine problems and neurological disorders, 99 percent of these chemicals have never been tested for their effects on human health. In researching that book, I was shocked at the misinformation – if not the total lack of information – about the products we use in our everyday lives… GMOs, and the chemicals used to grow them, have become so ubiquitous, so stitched into the fabric of our daily lives, that they are essentially invisible. To me, this invisibility is itself a problem: How can something as intimate as the food we eat be so utterly misunderstood? (page 10)

Full toxicity information for just 7%! This has got to be alarming. I share the author’s bewilderment as to how our culture has recently known so little about the very food that we’re eating to the point where the EPA, one of the most trusted agencies in our country, doesn’t even have a tenth of all the chemicals fully tested and only 1 percent never measured against human health. Regardless of who’s fault this is, this is definitely disturbing.

It’s not GMOs that are a problem, in other words; it’s the industrial food system that is the problem. That system is designed by and for the agrochemical industry to sell two enormously profitable products: chemicals, and the seeds that can withstand those chemicals. This system has been built so thoroughly around us that we don’t even see it. This book offers a look at something that is both very complex and very fundamental. Understanding what we eat, and how we have come to eat this way, requires thinking not just about food but also about history, and science, and politics, and ethics. Beneath these issues are fundamental questions of culture. How do we want to eat? How do we view the land we live on, and the plants and animals with whom we share that land? Do we trust the industries that are feeding us, or the government that is supposed to be protecting us? Do we trust that science can remain independent of corporate money and corporate power, and provide clear, independent answers to question that directly affect our lives? (page 11)

Pretty much a summary of the book. I completely agree.

In the United States, 95 percent of the 9 billion cows, hogs, chickens and turkeys raised for food eat GM grains. (page 24)

Humans have been domesticating animals for a long time so this isn’t entirely surprising but that’s still a crazy number.

There is a randomness in genetics, an unpredictability that lies at the heart of reproduction, and it is this imprecise nature of genetics that scientific critics of GMOs frequently invoke as a reason for caution. (pages 25-26)

A two-year study of pigs fed a mixture of GM corn found they developed severe stomach inflammation (and 25 percent heavier uteruses) than pigs fed non-GM corn. The findings were troubling… pigs were sickened not by a single GM grain, but by a mixture of different Gm grains. Mixed grains, the authors noted, are not tested for toxicity by regulators “anywhere in the world”. As for humans?…Huerta… will give an A to anyone who can show him a long-term clinical trial in humans showing that GMOs are safe. No one has ever found one. (pages 26-27)

This might be debatable or evidence might show the opposite elsewhere, but we definitely haven’t done enough long-term trials or tests on GMOs to know all their effects on human health whether they’re deemed safe or not. Plus, what does “safe” really mean? Is safe enough? We should go beyond seeing if they’re just safe or not.

In the United States over the last forty years, the use of the glyphosate (sold by Monsanto as Roundup, a product that makes the company $5 billion a year) has grown by a factor of 250, from less than half a million to 113 million kilograms a year. The International Agency for Research on Cancer… recently declared that glyphosate and 2,4-D (another common herbicide) should be classified as, respectively, “probable” and “possible” human carcinogens. (page 29)

We’re using a probable human carcinogen to spray our food. We then eat that. Some of it is bound to get into our systems regardless of how much food is cleaned before consumption. I don’t think that’s a very wise choice and as a public body, we need to get more real information on how much of this stuff is sprayed on crops and demand more research on how these affect our health.

E. G. Vallianatos… “Most government and academic scientists working on agricultural practices and pest control have obdurately ignored research into nature’s intricate and subtle workings. Instead, they have smoothed the way for the poisonous (and hugely profitable) concoctions of the chemical industry, and they are now doing the same for the rapidly growing field of genetic crop engineering.” (page 31)

When paired with and altered by the development of complicated and uncertain technologies like GMOs, nature does not receive this well. We should have and still should hold off or at least postpone the research and development of new technologies until we are sure that we know how we are mass affecting the environment and the natural world by employing these advances.

David Pimentel, a Cornell University scientist who has been studying American agriculture for fifty years, has estimated that pesticides cause some 300,000 poisonings a year in the United States; worldwide, the number is more than 26 million, 3 million of whom required hospitalization. Every year, pesticides kill 220,000 people worldwide and cause chronic illness… in another 750,000. (page 32)

This makes it clear that something is wrong and some of the stuff we are putting into our air, water, and land is definitely not something that should be there.

Of the six hundred pesticides now in use, federal regulators search for the residues of only about forty. (page 32)

If there’s no way of knowing the hundreds of substances that could be drifting through the air throughout the world at any time and we’ve had this happening for multiple decades, it’s no wonder so many people die from contamination each year as mentioned in the last quote.

Agrochemicals kill some 70 million birds every year in the United States alone. A quarter-million domestic animals are also poisoned every year by pesticides; farmers lose $30 million a year to animal illness and death caused by pesticide poisonings – an estimate considered low because it includes only numbers reported by veterinarians. (page 32)

Animals are affected even worse. 70 million birds! If this is true or even near true, we are literally committing mass animal genocide.

Some scientists wonder whether the rash of gluten intolerance currently afflicting the nation is actually Roundup intolerance. Glyphosate may be “the most important causal factor” in celiac disease, one study recently found; another found that glyphosate exposure can cause severe depletion of the nutrient manganese, a deficiency of which is associated with everything from anxiety to autism. (page 33)

I would be all for more research to affirm the resulting affects of glyphosate and chemicals like it. We’ve been using this since 1974 and haven’t known these possible effects until recently. What if we find out that it’s much worse or has been much worse than these studies have suggested?

One-quarter of Americans now suffer from multiple chronic diseases. Glyphosate-resistant weeds have now been found in eighteen countries, with significant impacts in Brazil, Australia, Argentina, and Paraguay. (page 34)

Spread to 18 countries. So this issue not only affects U.S. citizens and the food that they eat. These chemicals we produced might even be responsible for issues in other countries.

Meaning farmers must now return to… Recently approved “stacked” herbicides that combine glyphosate with 2,4-D, a component of Agent Orange, the carcinogenic defoliant used during the Vietnam War. (pages 34-35)

Europeans have bitterly opposed GMOs since the beginning… Prince Charles said GM foods took mankind into “realms that belong to God.”(page 37)

Other countries and regions in the world have proved that there is an alternative way of producing food that’s cheaper, more natural and if I were to guess, healthier and safer than ours.

In a 2013 New York Times poll, three-quarters of Americans surveyed expressed concern about GMOs in their food, with most worried about health risks. More than 90 percent of Americans want GMOs labeled, as they have required to be in countries such as India, China, Australia, and Brazil. (page 38)

People are worried. What are these companies and the government doing about people’s concerns?

Companies pushing the “safety” of GMOs are following a playbook written by Big Tobacco and Big Oil, which spent decades claim that science (about cancer, or about climate change) was bunk. Yet now, when consumers demand to know about GMOs – what they are and what their health and environmental consequences might be – industry claims to have science “on its side.” (pages 39-40)

In Maryland… suburban development has replaced 900,000 acres of farmland (and 500,000 acres of forest) in just the last forty years. All these new roads, and the suburbs and industries to which they gave birth, caused a second tectonic shift in American culture: in the way we came to eat. Car-friendly fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Carl’s Jr. and Burger King started popping up along the highway like weeds. (page 48)

Throughout the U.S. people have moved away or have been forced away from the urban areas and into cities.

As early as the 1970s, farmers around the country were being told (in the words of President Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Rusty Butz) to “get big or get out.” Most farmers got out. A little over a hundred years ago, there were 38 million people living in the United States, and 50 percent of them worked on a farm. Today, we have 300 million people. How many works on farms? Two percent. (page 49)

Fewer and fewer people farm for a living.

Industrial feedlots across the Midwest began buying trainloads of corn and soybeans to feed an industry that now slaughters 9 billion animals a year. (page 50)

9 billion animals. Just for our consumption. Many of those animals are wasted or thrown away. What if half the human population was wiped out and just wasted? That would be much different to people. Apparently, animals aren’t.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the varieties of fruits and vegetables being sold by commercial U.S. seed houses dropped by 97 percent. Varieties of cabbage dropped from 544 to 28; carrots from 287 to 21; cauliflower from 158 to 9; tomatoes from 408 to 79; garden peas from 408 to 25. Of more than 7,000 varieties of apples; more than 6,200 have been lost. (pages 50-51)

This is hard to picture. We’ve limited nearly everything to be of just a few varieties in just 100 years.

Genetic engineering did not create any of the structures that hold up our current food system. It merely added a set of tools – very powerful tools – to keep the whole machine running. The fact that these tools arrived on the scene at the very moment that the American food economy was becoming so intensely industrialized has created both enormous profits for the companies and enormous health and environmental problems for the rest of us. (page 60)

This is all I got for now and probably more than enough to give perspective. For more, you can read the book for yourself and see if your view on GMOs and the current state of our food system is enlightened.

My Personal Goodreads summary of this book:

This review is just my summary of the main points and themes that reoccurred and were important.

This book has great insight and discoverings into the true ways our food system is broken and highlights how GMOs can both help and hurt people depending on their motives. Light is also shed on some of the dangerous and detrimental effects caused by all the pesticides, herbicides and chemicals used to spray our foods and keep GMOs thriving on a large scale. Big companies and companies who produce or had a history of producing chemicals and pesticides are often the ones who produce GMOs on a large scale and have a lot of political and economic influence on our food system and the way things are regulated, sold and distributed. Almost everything in industrial farming is uniform, decisions are made behind closed doors and often the companies themselves are the ones testing their food. This allows for a lot of dishonesty. Plus their incentive is almost always profits, not the overall wellbeing of people. From my understanding, GMOs themselves are not bad. It’s the processed food made from GMO crops and industrial farming methods that are used to produce them that really wreck our health. One of the last things I took away from this book is if we want to create a future where you can know what you’re buying is nutritious, made with variety and not full of pesticides and who knows what other chemicals, we need to have sustainability. We should give more to family farmers and smaller farming communities that have had a history of living off the land and know how to properly grow food and maintain a variety of healthy crops that is easy to be distributed and bought locally and is transparent to their methods. We should focus on production over multiple generations and not just the next year. Especially as climate change worsens, doing these things will be considerably more important and we will have to be more environmentally conscious than we have before.

Overall, this book was a very informative read and uncovered a lot about our food and the problems encompassing how we make it.

Last Child in the Woods Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv book summary and quote explanations (To be added to):

Facts/Anecdotes from Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv:

“Like many parents, I do tend to romanticize my own childhood- and, I fear, too readily discount my children’s experiences of play and adventure. But my son was serious; he felt he had missed out on something important. He was right. Americans around my age, baby boomers or older, enjoyed a kind of free, natural play that seems, in the era of kid pagers, instant messaging, and Nintendo, like a quaint artifact. Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand, and experience nature has changed radically.” (page 1).
This book explores the increasing divide between the young and the natural world, and the environmental, social, psychological, and spiritual implications of that change. It also describes the accumulating research that reveals the necessity of contact with nature for healthy child-and adult- development. (page 2)
For children, nature comes in many forms… Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it. Nature offers healing for a child living in a destructive family or neighborhood. It serves as a blank slate upon which a child draws and reinterprets the culture’s fantasies. Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualization and the full use of the senses. (page 7)
“Sure, the little things, they notice,” she said. “But they’re distracted.” She described the last time her family had gone skiing, in Colorado. “It was a perfect, quiet day, the kids are skiing down the mountain – and they’ve got their headphones on. They can’t enjoy just hearing nature and being out there alone. They can’t make their own entertainment. They have to bring something with them… “Where I grew up, a person was just naturally outdoors all the time,” he said. “No matter which direction you went, you were outdoors -… Now, nature’s just not there anymore.” (page 12)
the third frontier is shaping how the current generation, and many to come, will perceive nature. Not yet fully formed or explored, this new frontier is characterized by at least five trends: a severance of the public and private mind from our food’s origins; a disappearing line between machines, humans, and other animals; an increasingly intellectual understanding of our relationship with other animals; the invasion of our cities wild animals (even as urban/suburban designers replace wilderness with synthetic nature); and the rise of a new kind of suburban form. (page 19)
To previous generations of children, few creations were as perfect or as beautiful as a tree. Now, researchers flood trees with genetic materials taken from viruses and bacteria to make them grow faster, to create better wood products, or to enable trees to clean polluted soil. In 2003, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded researchers to develop a tree capable of hanging colors when exposed to a biological or chemical attack. And the University of California promoted “birth control for trees,” a genetically engineered method of creating a “eunuch-tree that spends more of its energy making wood and not love.” For baby boomers, such news is fascinating, strange, disturbing. To children growing up in the third frontier, such news is simply more hair on the dog – an assumed complexity. (page 23)
Down came the ramps and poles, and indoors went the kids… Countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order. Many parents and kids now believe outdoor play is verboten even when it is not; perception is nine-tenths of the law… Today, more than 57 million Americans live in homes ruled by condominium, cooperative and homeowners’ associations, according to the Community Associations Insitute. The number of community associations burgeoned from 10,000 in 1970 to 286,000 today. These associations impose rules on adults and children (if children are allowed in them at all), ranging from mildly intrusive to draconian… But the unintended consequence is the discouragement of natural play. Public government also restricts children’s access to nature. (pages 28-29)
Copious studies show a reduced amount of leisure time experienced by modern families, more time in front of the TV and the computer, and growing obesity among adults and children, because of diet and sedentary lifestyles. We know these things. But do we know exactly how much less time children spend specifically in nature? No. (pages 31-32)
Most students were unable to name a single endangered plant species and knew only a few endangered animals… In the United States, children are spending less time playing outdoors – or in any unstructured way. From 1997 to 2003, there was a decline of 50 percent in the proportion of children nine to twelve who spent time in such outside activities as hiking, walking, fishing, beach play, and gardening, according to a study by Sandra Hofferth at the University of Maryland. (page 34)
Nature-Deficit Disorder describes the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the sense, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses. The disorder can be detected in individuals, families, and communities. Nature deficit can even change human behavior in cities, which could ultimately affect their design since long-standing studies show a relationship between the absence, or inaccessibility, of parks and open space with high crime rates, depression, and other urban maladies. (page 36)
A widening circle of researchers believes that the loss of natural habitat, or the disconnection from nature even when it is available, has enormous implications for human health and child development. They say the quality of exposure to nature affects our health at an almost cellular level… At the cutting edge of this frontier, added to the older foundation of ecological psychology, is the relatively new interdisciplinary field of ecopsychology. The term gained currency in 1992, through the writing of historian and social critic Theodore Roszak. In his book Voice of the Earth, Roszak argued that we have repressed our “ecological unconscious” that provides “our connection to our evolution on earth.”… As he points out, the American Psychiatric Association lists more than three hundred mental diseases in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a large number of them associated with sexual dysfunction… The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual “defines ‘separation anxiety disorder’ as ‘excessive anxiety concerning separation from home and from those to whom the individual is attached.’ But no separation is more pervasive in this Age of Anxiety than our disconnection from the natural world.” It’s time, he says, “for an environmentally based definition of mental health.” (pages 43-44)
Parents are told to turn off the TV and restrict video game time, but we hear little about what the kids should do physically during their non-electronic time. The usual suggestion is organized sports. But consider this: The obesity epidemic coincides with the greatest increase in organized children’s sports in history. Experts on child obesity now concede that current approaches don’t seem to be working. What are kids missing that organized sports including soccer and Little League, cannot provide? Oddly, the word “nature” has seldom shown up in the literature of child obesity, though that may be changing… ” Play in natural settings seems to offer special benefits. For none, children are more physically active when they are outside – a boon at a time of sedentary lifestyles and epidemic overweight,” according to Howard Frumkin, M.D., now director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health… But what about children’s emotional health? Although heart disease and other negative effects of their physical inactivity usually take decades to develop, another result of the sedentary life is more readily documented: kids get depressed. (pages 47-49)
Few of us are bout to trade our air conditioners for fans. But one price of progress is seldom mentioned: a diminished life of the senses. Like the boyz of the hood, as human beings we need direct, natural experiences; we require fully activated senses in order to feel fully alive. Twenty-first-century Western culture accepts the view that because of omnipresent technology we are awash in data. But in this information age, vital information is missing. Lawrence described his awakening in Taos, New Mexico, as an antidote to the “know-it-all state of mind,” that poor substitute for wisdom and wonder: … “As a matter of fact, our great-grandfathers, who never went anywhere, in actuality had more experience of the world than we have, who have seen everything.” It doesn’t take an encounter with a mountain lion for us to recognize that our sensory world has shrunk. (pages 58-59)
True, our experience of natural landscape “often occurs within an automobile looking out,” as Elaine Brooks said. But now even that visual connection is optional… Why do so many Americans say they want their children to watch less Tv, yet continue to expand the opportunities for them to watch it? More importantly, why do so many people no longer consider the physical world worth watching? The highway’s edges may not be postcard perfect. But for a century, children’s early understanding of how cities and nature fit together was gained from the backseat: the empty farmhouse at the edge of the subdivision; the variety of architecture, here and there; the woods and fields and water beyond the seamy edges – all that was and is still available to the eye. This was the landscape that we watched as children. It was our drive-by movie. Perhaps we’ll someday tell our grandchildren stories about our version of the nineteenth-century Conestoga wagon. “You did what?” they’ll ask. “Yes,” we’ll say, “it’s true. We actually looked out the car window.” (page 63)
In the most nature-deprived corners of our world we can see the rise of what might be called cultural autism. The symptoms? Tunneled senses, and feelings of isolation and containment. Experience, including physical risk, is narrowing to about the size of a cathode ray tube, or flat panel if you prefer… “What I see in America today is an almost religious zeal for the technological approach to every facet of life,” says Daniel Yankelovich, the veteran public opinion analyst. This faith, he says, transcends mere love for new machines. “It’s a value system, a way of thinking, and it can become delusional.” (page 65)
Little is known about the impact of new technologies on children’s emotional health… As we grow more separate from nature, we continue to separate from one another physically. The effects are more than skin deep, says Nancy Dess, senior scientists with the American Psychological Association. “None of the new communication technologies involve human touch; they all tend to place us one step removed from direct experience… Without any touch, infant primates die; adult primates with touch deficits become more aggressive. Primate studies also show that physical touch is essential to the peace-making process. “Perversely, many of us can go through an average day and not have more than a handshake,” she adds. Diminishing touch is only one by-product of the culture of technical control, but Dess believes it contributes to violence in an ever more tightly wired society… Instructors in medical schools find it increasingly difficult to teach how the heart works as a pump, he says, “because these students have so little real-world experience; they’ve never siphoned anything, never fixed a car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up a garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and wood,s had been replaced by indirect learning, through machines. These young people are smart, they grew up with computers, they were supposed to be superior – but now we know that something’s missing.” (page 67)
Professor Leslie Owen Wilson… offers a list of descriptors for children with the eight intelligence. Such children, she writes: 1. Have keen sensory skills, including sight, sound smell, taste and touch. 2. Readily use heightened sensory skills to notice and categorize things form the natural world. 3. Like to be outside, or like outside activities like gardening, nature walks, or field trips geared toward observing nature or natural phenomena. 4. Easily notice patterns from their surroundings – likes, differences, similarities, abnormalities. 5.

The Paradox of Choice

“I want a pair of jeans– 32-28,” I said.

“Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?” she replied. “Doy you want them stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?”

I was stunned. A moment or two later I sputtered something like, “I just want regular jeans. You know, the kind that used to be the only kind.” … The trouble was that with all these options available to me now, I was no longer sure that “regular” jeans were what I wanted…. I entered the dressing room. I tried on all the pants and scrutinized myself in a mirror. I asked once again for further clarification. Whereas very little was riding on my decision. I was now convinced that one of these options had to be right for me, and I was determined to figure it out. But I couldn’t. Finally, I chose the easy fit, because “relaxed fit” implied that I was getting soft in the middle and needed to cover it up. The jeans I chose turned out fine, but it occurred to me that day that buying a pair of pants should not be a daylong project. By creating all these options, the store undoubtedly had done a favor for customers with varied tastes and body types. However, by vastly expanding the range of choices, they had also created a new problem that needed to be solved. Before these options were available, a buyer like myself had to settle for an imperfect fit, but at least purchasing jeans was a five-minute affair. Now it was a complex decision in which I was forced to invest time, energy, and no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety, and dread. Buying jeans is a trivial matter, but it suggests a much larger theme we will pursue throughout this book, which is this: when people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation, this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize. Tyrranize? That’s a dramatic claim, especially following an example about buying jeans. But our subject is by no means limited to how we go about selecting consumer goods. This book is about the choices Americans face in almost all areas of life: education, career, friendship, sex, romance, parenting, religious observance. There is no denying that choice improves the quality of our lives. It enables us to control our destinies and to come close to getting exactly what we want out of any situation. Choice is essential to autonomy, which is absolutely fundamental to well-being. Healthy people want and need to direct their own lives. On the other hand, the fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better. As I will demonstrate, there is a cost to having an overload of choice. As a culture, we are enamored of freedom, self-determination, and variety, and we are reluctant to give up any of our options. But clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction – even to clinical depression. (page 1-3)

Interesting intro. A good way of demonstrating how choice can control our lives due to a lot of things and how it’s bad for us. Also, I kind of agree that our culture makes us make bad decisions and have a lot of other psychological effects because we have values that allow us to overload ourselves with choice and almost be infatuated and forced to consider so many of these options in various aspects of daily life. Capitalism and having a massive economy and amount of products and services available in life in general probably contributes to too many choices screwing us up. If our culture wasn’t so materialistic and people didn’t want to eat everything with their eyes and go insane about upgrading their lives and being better than everyone else, that would solve a lot of issues.

Following that thread, Part I discusses how the range of choices people face every day has increased in recent years. Part II discusses how we choose and shows how difficult and demanding it is to make wise choices. Choosing well is especially difficult for those determined to make only the best choices, individuals I refer to as “maximizers.” Part III is about how and why choice can make us suffer. It asks whether increased opportunities for choice actually make people happier, and concludes that often they do not. It also identifies several psychological processes that explain why added options do not make people better off: adaptation, regret, missed opportunities, raised expectations, and feelings of inadequacy in comparison with others. It concludes with the suggestion that increased choice may actually contribute to the recent epidemic of clinical depression affecting much of the Western world. Finally, in Part IV, I offer a series of recommendations for taking advantage of what is positive, and avoiding what is negative, in our modern freedom of choice. (pages 4-5)

Don’t be a maximizer perfectionist stuck to decide vulnerable little sheep. It messes up your ability to accept that life can’t be perfect and that contributes to bad choices and depression and other crap. This is pretty much a rough explanation of what the book withholds.

There are important lessons to be learned from this research, some of them not so obvious, and others even counterintuitive. For example, I will argue that:

We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.
We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best (have you ever heard a parent say, “I want only the ‘good enough’ for my kids”?).
We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions
We would be better off if the decisions we made were nonreversible.
We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing

(page 5)

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One study was set in a gourmet food store in an upscale community where, on weekends, the owners commonly set up sample tables of new items. When researchers set up a display featuring a line of exotic, high-quality jams, customers who came by could taste samples, and they were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one condition of the study, 6 varieties of the jam were available. In either case, the entire set of 24 varieties was available for purchase. The large array of jams attracted more people to the table than the small array, though in both cases people tasted about the same number of jams on average. When it came to buying, however, a huge difference became evident. Thirty percent of the people exposed to the small array of jams actually bought a jar; only 3 percent of those exposed to the large array of jams did so.

In a second study, this time in the laboratory, college students were asked to evaluate a variety of gourmet chocolates, in the guise of a marketing survey. The students were then asked which chocolate – based on description and appearance – they would choose for themselves. Then they tasted and rated that chocolate. Finally, in a different room, the students were offered a small box of chocolates in lieu of cash as payment for their participation. For one group of students, the initial array of chocolates numbered 6, and for the other, it numbered. 30. The key results of this study were that the students faced with the small array were more satisfied with their tasting than those faced with the large array. In addition, they were four times as likely to choose chocolate rather than cash as compensation for their participation. (pages 19-20)

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But what I think is most important is that people won’t ignore alternatives if they don’t realize that too many alternatives can create a problem. And our culture sanctifies freedom of choice so profoundly that the benefits of infinite options seem self-evident. When experiencing dissatisfaction or hassle on a shopping trip, consumers are likely to blame it on something else – surely salespeople, traffic jams, high prices, items out of stock – anything but the overwhelming array of options… There are now several books and magazines devoted to what is called the “voluntary simplicity” movement. Its core idea is that we have too many choices, too many decisions, too little time to do what is really important. (page 21)

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Filtering out extraneous information is one of the basic functions of consciousness. If everything available to our senses demanded our attention at all times, we wouldn’t be able to get through the day. Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy, as well as the number of processes we have to engage in and think about, for each of us to obtain the necessities of life… As cultures advanced, not every individual had to focus every bit of energy, every day, on filling his belly… In the past few decades, though, that long process of simplifying and bundling economic offerings has been reversed. Increasingly, the trend moves back toward time-consuming foraging behavior, as each of us is forced to sift for ourselves through more and more options in almost every aspect of life. (page 23)

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Responsibility for medical care has landed on the shoulders of patients with a resounding thud. I don’t mean choice of doctors: we’ve always had that (if we aren’t among the nation’s poor), and with managed care, we surely have less of it than we had before. I mean choice about what the doctors do. The tenor of medical practice has shifted from one in which the all-knowing, paternalistic doctor tells the patient what must be done -or just does it- to one in which the doctor arrays the possibilities before the patient, along with the likely plusses and minuses of each, and the patient makes a choice. The attitude was well described by physician and New Yorker contributor Atul Gawande:

Only a decade ago, doctors made the decisions: patients did what they were told. Doctors did not consult patients about their desires and priorities, and routinely withheld information – sometimes crucial information, such as what drugs they were on, what treatments they were being given, and what their diagnosis was. Patients were even forbidden to look at their own medical records: it wasn’t their property, doctors said. They were regarded as children: too fragile and simpleminded to handle the truth, let alone make decisions. And they suffered for it. (page 30-30)

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A range of life choices has been available to Americans for quite some time. But in the past, the “default” options were so powerful and dominant that few perceived themselves to be making choices. Whom we married was a matter of choice, but we knew that we would do it as soon as we could and have children, because that was something all people did. The anomalous few who departed from this pattern were seen as social renegades, subjects of gossip and speculation. These days, it’s hard to figure out what kind of romantic choice would warrant such attention. Wherever we look, we see almost every imaginable arrangement of intimate relations… Today, all romantic possibilities are on the table; all choices are real. Which is another explosion of freedom, but which is also another set of choices to occupy attention and fuel our anxieties. (page 38-39)

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Sociologist Alan Wolfe recently documented this change in people’s orientation to religious institutions and teachings in the book Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice, Wolfe conducted in-depth interviews with a wide variety of people scattered throughout the U.S., and what he found was near unanimity that it was up to each person, as an individual, to pick her or his own values and maker her or his own moral choices… On the positive side, an individual can experience a personal form of participation consistent with his or her lifestyle, values, and goals. The negative is the burden of deciding which institution to join, and which practices to observe. (page 40)

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What can it mean to suggest, as I have in these first two chapters, that we face more choices and more decisions today than ever before? Think about what you do when you wake up in the morning…. Each and every part of this boring morning ritual is a matter of choice… But they don’t count, really, as choices. You could have done otherwise but you never gave it a thought. So though it is logically true that you could have done otherwise, there is little psychological reality to this freedom of choice. … This is a very good thing. The burden of having every activity be a matter of deliberate and conscious choice would be too much for any of us to bear. The transformation of choice in modern life is that choice in many facets of life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real. So we now face a demand to make choices that is unparalleled in human history. … If it were up to us to choose whether or not to have choice, we would opt for choice almost every time. But it is the cumulative effect of these added choices that I think is causing substantial distress. As I mentioned in CHapter 1, we are trapped in what Fred Hirsch called “the tyranny of small decisions.” In any given domain, we say a resounding “yes” to choice, but we never cast a vote on the whole package of choices. Nonetheless, by voting yes in every particular situation, we are in effect voting yes on the package-with the consequence that we’re left feeling barely able to manage. (pages 43-44)

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Most good decisions will involve these steps:

Figure out your goal or goals.
Evaluate the importance of each goal.
Array the options.
Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals.
Pick the winning option.
Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities

(page 47)

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The process of goal-setting and decisions making begins with the question: “What do I want?” On the surface, this looks as if it should be easy to answer. The welter of information out there in the world notwithstanding, “What do I want?” is addressed largely through internal dialogue. But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task. … The way that the meal or the music or the movie makes you feel in the moment-either good or bad- could be called experienced utility. You have to pick a restaurant, a CD, or a movie, and you make these choices based upon how you expect the experiences to make you feel. So choices are based upon expected utility. And once you have had experience with particular restaurants, CDs, or movies, future choices will be based upon what you remember about these past experiences, in other words, on their remembered utility. To say that we know what we want, therefore, means that these three utilities align, with expected utility being matched by experienced utility, and experienced utility faithfully reflected in remembered utility. The trouble is, though, that these three utilities rarely line up so nicely. (page 48-49)

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The availability heuristic says that we assume that the more available some piece of information is to memory, the more frequently we must have encountered it in the past. This heuristic is partly true. In general, the frequency of experience is not the only thing that affects availability to memory. But frequency of experience is not the only thing that affects availability to memory. Salience or vividness matters as well. Because starting letters of words are much more salient than third letters, they are much more useful as cues for retrieving words from memory. So it’s the salience of starting letters that makes t-words come easily to mind, while people mistakenly think it’s the frequency of starting letters that makes them come easily to mind. In addition to affecting the ease with which we retrieve information from memory, salience or vividness will influence the weight we give any particular information. (page 58)

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In this chapter we’ve seen some of the mistakes people can make predicting what they want, gathering information about alternatives, and evaluating that information. The evidence clearly demonstrates that people are susceptible to error even when choosing among a handful of alternatives to which they can devote their full attention. Susceptibility to error can only get worse as the number and complexity of decisions increase, which in general describe the conditions of daily life. Nobody has the time or cognitive resources to be completely thorough and accurate with every decision, and as more decisions are required and more options are available, the challenge of doing the decisions making correctly becomes ever more difficult to meet. With many decisions, the consequences of error may be trivial-a small price to pay for the wealth of choices available to us. But with some, the consequences of error may be quite severe. … As we find more and more important decisions on our plates, we may be forced to make many of those decisions with inadequate reflection. And in these cases, the stakes can be high. … The growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related, unfortunate effects.

It means that decicions require more effort.

It makes mistakes more likely.

It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe.

(pages 73-74)

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Finally, the very wealth of options before us may burn us from choosers into pickers. A chooser is someone who thinks actively about the possibilities before making a decision. A chooser reflects on what’s important to him or her in life, what’s important about this particular decisions, and what the short- and long-range consequences of the decisions may be. A chooser makes decisions in a way that reflects awareness of what a given choice means about him or her as a person. Finally, a chooser is thoughtful enough to conclude that perhaps none of the available alternatives are satisfactory, and that if he or she wants the right alternative, he or she may have to create it. A picker does none of these things. … Unfortunately, the proliferation of choice in our livers robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is. (page 75)

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The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops…. The key is that maximizers… spend a great deal of time and effort… In the end, they are likely to get less satisfaction out of the exquisite choices they make than will satisficers. … I believe that the goal of maximizing is a source of great dissatisfaction, that it can make people miserable-especially in a world that insists on providing an overwhelming number of choices, both trivial and not so trivial. … satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy. In other words, the best people can do, all things considered, is to satisfice. (pages 78-79)

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Every choice we make is a testament to our autonomy, to our sense of self-determination. Almost every social, moral, or political philosopher in the Western tradition since Plato has placed a premium on such autonomy. And each new expansion of choice gives us another opportunity to assert our autonomy, and thus display our character. But choices have expressive functions only to the extent that we can make them freely. … The value of autonomy is built into the fabric of our legal and moral system. Autonomy is what gives us the license to hold one another morally (and legally) responsible for our actions. It’s the reason we praise individuals for their achievements and also blame them for their failures. There’s not a single aspect of social life that would be recognizable if we abandoned our commitment to autonomy. (page 101)

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More than a quarter of Americans report being lonely, and loneliness seems to come not from being alone, but from lack of intimacy. We spend less time visiting with neighbors. We spend less time visiting with our parents, and much less time visiting with other relatives. And once again, this phenomenon adds to our burden of choice. As Lane writes: “What was once given by neighborhood and work now must be achieved; people have had to make their own friends . . . and actively cultivate their own family connections.” In other words, our social fabric is no longer a birthright but has become a series of deliberate and demanding choices. (page 110)

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Ultimately, the quality of choices that matters to people is the subjective experience that the choices afford. And if, beyond a certain point, adding options diminishes our subjective experience, we are worse off for it. (page 124)

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So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive. (page 125)

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Faced with one attractive option, two-thirds of people are willing to go for it. But faced with two attractive options, only slightly more than half are willing to buy. Adding the second option creates a conflict, forcing a trade-off between price and quality. Without a compelling reason to go one way or the other, potential consumers pass up the sale altogether. By creating the conflict, this second option makes it harder, not easier to make a choice. Consumers need or want reasons to justify choices

(page 126)

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The emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves. There is a great deal of evidence that negative emotional states of mind narrow our focus. Instead of examining all aspects of a decision, we home in on only one or two, perhaps ignoring aspects of the decision that are very important. Negative emotion also distracts us, inducing us to focus on the emotion rather than on the decision itself. As the sakes of the decisions involving trade-offs rise, emotions came become more powerful, and our decision making can be severely impaired. … when we are in a good mood, we think better. We consider more possibilities; we’re open to considerations that would otherwise not occur to us; we see subtle connections … In general, positive emotion enables us to broaden our understanding of what confronts us. (pages 131-132)

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We’ve seen that as the number of options under consideration goes up and the attractive features associated with the rejected alternatives accumulate, the satisfaction derived from the chosen alternative will go down. This is one reason, and a very important one, why adding options can be detrimental to our wellbeing. Because we don’t put rejected options out of our minds, we experience the disappointment of having our satisfaction with decisions diluted by all the options we considered but did not choose. (pages 132-133)

I think it’s interesting to consider that first part and it applies to a lot of other decisions people make when confronted with trade-offs and many options.