Quotes from Stephen Harrod Buhner

In a dynamic and self-organizing state, this open-endedness is most pronounced at the point of bifurcation: the critical or singular moment when a system has the potential of entering one or two or more available states. NIGEL CLARK

The number of sperm cells released in a single ejaculation of one man is 175 thousand times more than the number of eggs a woman produces in her entire lifetime. It can be more than the number of people in North America; hundreds of millions.

As Einstein so eloquently put it, We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. So

Frank Ryan comments that The microbes that kill people, particularly those that kill huge numbers in sweeping epidemics, follow, in many ways, the same universal law of predator and prey. It is part of this complex gestalt that the balance is shaped by the behavior of the prey. If the prey moves—if it changes, if its numbers increase or decrease, if its ecology alters—the predator must move with it.29

neural mechanisms for filtering sensory data inflows exist in the neural networks for every type of sensory input that we experience, including our nonkinesthetic feeling sense (what I have called heart perception in The Secret Teachings of Plants

As James Lovelock notes . . . No one doubts that humans are in thermostasis, yet our core temperatures range from 35 to 40°C and our extremities from 5 to 45°C. This may appear imprecise, but it serves us well.9

The fairly recent discovery that all of the water supplies in the industrialized countries are contaminated with minute amounts of antibiotics (from their excretion into water supplies) means that bacteria everywhere are experiencing low doses of antibiotics all the time. This exposure is exponentially driving resistance learning; the more antibiotics that go into the water, the faster the bacteria learn.

The world is not a static backdrop across which humans can move, building their suburbs where they will, the only intelligent actors on the planet. They call it the American dream, as George Carlin once put it, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.

Interestingly, the word, intelligence, comes from the Latin phrase inter legere—it means, simply, "to choose.

And, in fact, a crucial additional, and almost-always-overlooked, aspect of intelligence in living systems is that they possess the capacity to innovate behavior, that is, to generate unique solutions to the environmental challenges that face them. They have the ability, as the Latin root of the word indicates, to choose.

Staphylococcus organisms are "the leading cause of pus-forming skin and soft tissue infections, the leading cause of infectious heart disease, the number one hospital acquired infection, and one of the four leading causes of food-borne illness."23??? And

As Anthony Trewavas once put it, "The use of the term 'vegetable' to describe unthinking or brain-dead human beings perhaps indicates the general attitude [toward plants].

Lewontin goes on to say, "The characteristic of a living object is that it reacts to external stimuli rather than being passively propelled by them. An organism's life consists of constant mid-course corrections."11

nondomesticated explorer of the natural world

Our intelligence is only a special instance of a general condition.

Darwin had two genuinely deep insights that are paradigm altering: 1) that the root of the plant is in fact its brain; and 2) that the plant is using sensitive, and intelligent, analysis of it surroundings to navigate through the soil.

The pre-attentional parts of the self use a complicated analytic process to determine relevance. They weigh a large variety of factors to gauge relevance; this includes such things as the intensity of the sensory inflow, its novelty, the degree of contrast between a sensory stimulus and its sensory background, and its rarity.

The contrast between these stories is painful but inescapable. It is not only the rainforest that is being chewed up in the industrial machine, but also human cultures 30,000 years old, ways of thinking radically different from Western approaches, plants that may never be seen again, and things that many of us will never know we lost.

This new view considers plants as information-processing organisms with complex communication throughout the individual plant. Plants are as sophisticated in behavior as animals but their potential has been masked because it operates on time scales many orders of magnitude longer than that operation in animals. .

Or as Lynn Margulis (and Dorion Sagan) once put it, "Our intolerant slogans continually denigrate the nonhuman life with which we share this planet.

Because the Nazis taught me this: There is a Hitler inside each of us and if we do not heal the Hitler inside of ourselves, then the violence, it will never stop.

Because Gram-positive bacteria have only a single cell wall, even though it's thicker, they are, in general, much easier to treat. With Gram-negative bacteria, two cell walls have to be penetrated, not just one. In essence, the bacteria have two chances to identify and deactivate an antibacterial that is hostile to them. Even if an antibiotic gets into the periplasmic space, it usually will not kill the bacteria. It still has to penetrate the second wall.

There is an embedded assumption in evolutionary theory that the human race came from some prehuman source and through natural selection is heading someplace incredible, some peak of evolution that is our ultimate destination. This belief naturally engenders the perspective that the human achievements of the past were all right for our ancestors, but in the here-and-now are obviously primitive and hopelessly old-fashioned.