Quotes About Nature

Someday we'll learn again how to train on this living place, and holding still will be like flying.

ecosystems tend towards diversity, and markets do the opposite

The world depends on so many different species, each a nutty experiment

If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity ...

There are no individuals. There aren't even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.

The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.

The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you're by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.

He covers his closed eyes with one hand and says, I'm sorry. No forgiveness comes, or ever will. But here's the thing about trees, the greatest thing: even when he can't see them, even when he can't get near, even when he can't remember how they go, he can climb, and they will hold him high above the ground and let him look out over the arc of the Earth.

Trees give it all away, don't they?

photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation's entire cathedral.

Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?

No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things.

Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation.

What?" he asks the tree. "What? " The tree feels no need to reply.

The solitary act of sitting over the page and waiting for her hand to move may be as close as she'll ever get to the enlightenment of plants.

someone to speak for the trees." She

The sunlight's blaze doesn't threaten the yellow of a flower. We only resent what we can still hope to be.

Maybe it's useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.

She writes her favorite lines in the inside covers of her field notebooks and peeks at them when department politics and the cruelty of frightened humans get her down. The words withstand the full brutality of day. We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems.

The tree is saying things, in words before words. It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering. It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride.

We made this! It's so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

Sol 3, that little blue dot, had a lot going for it, when you could get away from the dominant species long enough to clear your head.