Quotes About Nature

MILES BELOW and three centuries earlier, a pollen-coated wasp crawled down the hole at the tip of a certain green fig and laid eggs all over the involute garden of flowers hidden inside. Each of the world's seven hundred and fifty species of Ficus has its own unique wasp tailored to fertilize it. And this one wasp somehow found the precise fig species of her destiny. The foundress laid her eggs and died. The fruit that she fertilized became her tomb.

The things she catches Doug-firs doing, over the course of these years, fill her with joy. When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other

Yet still this tree has a secret tucked into the thin, living cylinder beneath its bark. Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There's work to do. Star-work, but earthbound all the same.

those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one. Networked together underground by countless thousands of miles of living fungal threads, her trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, pool their resources and metabolites into community chests. . . . It will take years for the picture to emerge. There

seems most of nature isn't red in tooth and claw, after all. For one, those species at the base of the living pyramid have neither teeth nor talons. But if trees share their storehouses, then every drop of red must float on a sea of green.

nutmeg's inverted spade, gnarled baja elephant

Six different kinds of forest all around us. Seventeen hundred flowering plants. More tree species than in all of Europe. Thirty kinds of salamander, for God's sake. 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. Above us, a raven the size of an Oz winged monkey flew up into a white pine.

the Buddha's words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.

The Golden Guide to Pond Life, The Golden Guide to Stars, to Rocks and Minerals, to Reptiles and Amphibians: humans are almost beside the point.

She looks for the towering black locust, with its fragrant racemes and pea-pod seeds, the tree that stunned Muir into becoming a naturalist. But the world-changing locust was cut down twelve years before.

Children, women, slaves, aboriginals, the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law. So why shouldn't trees and eagles and rivers and living mountains be able to sue humans for theft and endless damages? (p. 250)

Does it bother you, to be such a destroyer of productivity?" Neelay gazes out on a patch of mountain shaved bare half a century ago. "I don't think . . . It might not be so bad, to destroy a little productivity.

But the spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they've lived through.

Noisy aspens and remnant birches, forests of cottonwoods and poplars, take up the chorus: The world is turning into a new thing.

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 (p. 423).

TWENTY SPRINGS is no time at all. The hottest year ever measured comes and goes. Then another. Then ten more, almost every one of them among the hottest in recorded history. The seas rise. The year's clock breaks. Twenty springs

Each one volunteers to be eaten, so others might be spread far afield.

People have no corner on curious behavior. Other creatures—bigger, slower, older, more durable—call the shots, make the weather, feed creation, and create the very air.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only aslightly greener thing, we'd drown you in meaning.

Neelay, please

It's a grand, luxurious act of self-deceit, an outright lie, that claim of Kant's: As far as nonhumans are concerned, we have no direct duties. All exists merely as means to an end. That end is man.

Trees trade airborne aerosol signals, the article says. They make medicines.

But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes.

Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they're a day. She wouldn't be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around for the better part of a million years. That's why she has stopped: to see one of the oldest, largest living things on earth. All around her spreads one single male whose genetically identical trunks cover more than a hundred acres.