Quotes About Nature

Here's a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren't shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.

This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

it may be that certain species are bribing you. So many wonder drugs have come from trees, and we haven't yet scratched the surface of the offerings. Trees have long been trying to reach us. But they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear. She's

You live between three trees.

Her staff tells her not to, but she cites the numbers. Wasn't Shaw right about how the mark of true intelligence is to be moved by statistics? Seventeen kinds of forest dieback, all made worse by warming. Thousands of square miles a year converted to development. Annual net loss of one hundred billion trees. Half the woody species on the planet, gone by this new century's end.

And soon enough, she was sold on the fine art of hang gliding above the busy earth.

Before it dies, a Douglas-fir, half a millennium old, will send its storehouse of chemicals back down into its roots and out through its fungal partners, donating its riches to the community pool in a last will and testament.

Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze. as certain as weather coming from the west, the things people know for sure will change. there is no knowing for a fact. the only dependable things are humility and looking.

She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

lot of folks think trees are simple things, incapable of doing anything interesting. But there's a tree for every purpose under heaven. Their chemistry is astonishing. Waxes, fats, sugars. Tannins, sterols, gums, and carotenoids. Resin acids, flavonoids, terpenes. Alkaloids, phenols, corky suberins. They're learning to make whatever can be made. And most of what they make we haven't even identified.

The great cycles of air and water are breaking. The Tree of Life will fall again, collapse into a stump of invertebrates, tough ground cover, and bacteria, unless man . . . Unless man.

real joy consists of knowing that human wisdom counts less than the shimmer of beeches in a breeze.

A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren't shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses.

The canopy is a colander stippling the beetle-swarmed surfaces with specks of sun.

Douglas Pavlicek works a clear-cut as big as downtown Eugene, saying goodbye to his plants as he tucks each one in. Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child's play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over.

He stands near the planting, its black ring of soil like a promise at his feet.

What else is there to say to a bear? 'Apologize!' I tell him. People very stupid. They forget everything--where they come from, where they go. I say, 'Don't worry. People leaving this world very soon. Then the bear get top bunk to himself again.

No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible.

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Identity formation and Big Five personality factors among plants rights activists." "Or: Who does the tree-hugger really hug, when he hugs a tree?

The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, [...] rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks [...] gather on the crags. And down in cool ripatian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize [...]

I was thinking it's going to be cold again tonight. We may need to zip the bags together. I'm down with that. Every star in the galaxy rolls out above them, through the blue-black needles, in a river of spilled milk. The night sky- the best drug there was, before people came together into something stronger. They zip the bags together. You know, she says, if one of us falls, the other is going with. I'll follow you anywhere.

He tells her, on their drives, about all the oblique miracles that green can devise.