Quotes from John Vaillant

the tiger is a bellwether--one of thousands of similarly vulnerable species, which are, at once, casualties of our success and symbols of our failure. The current moment is proof of our struggle to evolve (perhaps "mature" is a better word) beyond outmoded fears and attitudes, to face the fact that nature is neither our enemy nor our slave.

sylvan netherworld

Traveling in these giant cedar canoes, the Haida would regularly paddle their home into, and out of, existence. With each collective paddle stroke they would have seen their islands sinking steadily into the sea while distant snow-covered peaks scrolled up before them like a new planet. Few people alive today have any notion of how it might feel to pull worlds up from beyond the horizon by faith and muscle alone.

tigers can weigh six hundred pounds; they have been hunting large prey, including humans, for two million years; and they have a memory. For these reasons, tigers can be as dangerous to the people trying to protect them as they are to those who would profit from them.

Conflict Tiger.

It is due in large part to these immense trees that the Northwest forests support more living tissue, by weight, than any other ecosystem, including the equatorial jungle.

Around the village, tree-lined ridges rose up against the deeper dark beyond and, along that wavering verge, stars moved imperceptibly in the treetops, encircling man and animal alike. Altogether, those cross-hatched branches wove a spangled basket against the sky and somewhere inside it was the tiger, hunting.

Nassim Taleb, a statistician, risk analyst, and author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, calls it the "Lucretius Problem." Named

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. —Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message

There are two categories of people when it comes to extreme situations," said the leopard specialist Vasily Solkin. "One gets scared first and then starts thinking; the other starts thinking first and gets scared after the fact. Only the latter survive in the taiga.

Sokolov paused, trying to find words to describe a sensation that is essentially indescribable. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas could have helped him here: on the African savanna, she explains in The Tribe of Tiger , when thunder rolls, lions will roar back. What other creature, besides the lion, the tiger, and the whale, can answer Creation in its own language?

June is a bad month for bugs in Alaska; generally it takes a good five or ten knots of breeze to keep them at bay, but even then they will tend to hover in your lee, waiting for the wind to die. Mosquitoes swarm so thickly up there that they can, like clouds, briefly form recognizable shapes. This is probably the only circumstance in nature where it is possible to look downwind and see a shadow of oneself infused with one's own blood.

Are you the thing you want most, or its' opposite? If I want nothing more than water, is it because I am water or because I have none?

But whence came the race of man? I will make a guess. A change of climate killed the great northern forests, Forcing the manlike apes down from their trees Ã¢â'¬Â¦ They had to go down to the earth, where green still grew And small meats might be gleaned. But there the great flesh-eaters, Tiger and panther and the horrible fumbling bear and endless wolf-packs made life A dream of death. Therefore man has those dreams, And kills out of pure terror.

The Lebanese flag has a cedar tree on it because much of what is now desert was thickly forested before the harbingers of civilization--i.e., woodcutters, farmers, and goats--saw to it that large stands of cedar will never grace the Holy Land again. The stark and sere limestone hills that we think of as typical Greek and Italian landscape were once all but invisible beneath a layer of long-gone topsoil held in place by forests of cedar and oak.

When we look at nature, we are only looking at the survivors. STEPHEN BUDIANSKY, If a Lion Could Talk

But there are some key differences: tigers can weigh six hundred pounds; they have been hunting large prey, including humans, for two million years; and they have a memory. For these reasons, tigers can be as dangerous to the people trying to protect them as they are to those who would profit from them.

At what point does the brown cloud over an industrial city become a problem as opposed to a sky-high banner proclaiming good times? When does the ration of clear-cuts and Christmas tree farms to healthy, intact forest begin to cause aesthetic and moral discomfort, or real environmental damage?

Tigers go by several different names here, and one of them is Toyota-because, during the 1990's, that is what you could buy with one.

With no overarching cosmology to guide them, only vestigial formalities, each would have to decide for himself what their friend and neighbor's eternal fate might be.

Once you have passed the solitude test," continued Solkin, "you have absolute confidence in yourself, and there is nothing that can break you afterward.

After scavenging some rancid bait that had been sealed inside a plastic jar, the tiger hauled Tsepalev's mattress out of the shelter and dragged it fifty yards across the frozen Takhalo. There, on the opposite bank, he spread the mattress out under a commanding spruce tree, lay down on it in plain view, and waited.

Every melody is based on the same seven notes, but some melodies make you happy, some make you sad, and some can terrify you. Well, this was a roar which makes your blood go cold in your veins and your hair stand up on your head. You could call it a 'premonition of death.

Were one to try to identify the single most important influence on Markov's destiny—besides Markov himself—it would probably be a toss-up between Mao Zedong and perestroika.