Quotes from Diana Beresford-Kroeger

I want to remind you that the forest is far more than a source of timber. It is our collective medicine cabinet. It is our lungs. It is the regulatory system for our climate and our oceans. It is the mantle of our planet. It is the health and well-being of our children and grandchildren. It is our sacred home. It is our salvation.

To our young selves, though, there is no difference between the small questions and the big ones. We follow our curiosity to the edge of our understanding and then ask whoever is around what lies beyond it. I have spent my adult life fighting to keep what I possessed as a child: the ability to see the biggest questions sitting inside the smallest ones and the willingness to try to answer them.

I want to remind you that the forest is far more than a source of timber. It is our collective medicine cabinet. It is our lungs. It is the regulatory system for our climate and our oceans. It is the mantle of our planet. It is the health and well-being of our children and grandchildren. It is our sacred home.

Trees don't simply maintain the conditions necessary for human and most animal life on earth, trees created these conditions through the community of forests. Trees paved the way for the human family. The debt we owe them is too big to ever repay.

Scholarship was a hidey hole, a place where I could escape negative feelings. But as I learned more about the world, I realized that a life buried in books quite suited me.

The truth was right there, so simple, a child could grasp it. Trees were responsible for the most basic necessity of life, the air we breathe.

Looking out on the field that morning, I didn't believe we could finish the cut. It was too big a job and I was too small a helper. But because I loved Pat and loved the farm and the Droim, because I loved that crop of barley and couldn't stand to see it spoiled, I was prepared to try. I took a deep breath and a first step and both eventually led me to the knowledge that I was capable of things bigger than I'd imagined.

The trees kept coming into my dreams at night, too, with their long swags of shadow changing the landscape of the bedroom wall.

The truth was right there, so simple, a child could grasp it. Trees were responsible for the most basic necessity of life, the air we breathe...cutting down trees was a suicidal act.