Quotes About Nature

The song of the dodo, if it had one, is forever unknowable because no human from whom we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the Mauritian forest and listen.

With our virus, people like to say, they'll say, 'Oh, you study that virus that causes the insect to explode!' Like, the virus doesn't cause the insect to explode," he insisted. "It causes it to melt.

know that walking into a small woodlot," he wrote, "is riskier than walking into a nearby large, extensive forest.

Does a virus constitute wildlife?

Onward we climb. The upper slope is a crust of friable lava. It crunches like peanut brittle beneath our steps.

But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.

Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

The swallow that hibernates underwater is a creature called yearning.

In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak.

He hoped these students would learn how to be at home in the desert, not how to conquer it; and he hoped that, in the process, they might discover the spiritual value of quietude.

Exactly. Now think about it, Tucker. Someone walked up to that young, tender sapling and, without any regard for what was right or wrong, took out a long, sharp steel steeple and hammered it deep into the tree to hold the wire in place. It probably tore the bark and splattered sap into the air. The tree didn't ask for it and certainly didn't deserve it to be done. If you think about it, it was a cruel thing to

is the basic problem the nature of this world itself, or our inability to accept it as it is? Or something else?

Land and water are not really separate things, but they are separate words, and we perceive through words.

Life is stranger than biology textbooks.

A flower's structure leads a bee toward having pollen adhere to its body . . . we don't know of any such reason why beautiful places attract humans.

Every time we exterminate a predator, we are in a sense creating a new predator.

We come into the world as wild things and go out the same way, no matter how many boxes of lead or concrete we sheath about our bones (and the faster we consume the resources that eons of creative wildness have left us, the faster will the wild forces of deterioration pull us down). So it is not enough to look back and admire wildness as our heritage, we must look forward to it as well.

Inhofe concluded: "This is what a lot of alarmists forget. God is still up there, and He promised to maintain the seasons.

Without recognizing it, we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change. I believe that we are at the end of nature.

Winnie would never be free of religious thinking, and she couldn't imagine ever wanting to be. She just needed a new schedule for her faith, one whose appointments with the divine were arranged not only through sermons, songs, and scripture, but rather on a walk-in basis with rocks, water, air, blood, space, and time.

In a true you-and-I relationship, we are present mindfully, nonintrusively, the way we are present with things in nature.We do not tell a birch tree it should be more like an elm. We face it with no agenda, only an appreciation that becomes participation: 'I love looking at this birch' becomes 'I am this birch' and then 'I and this birch are opening to a mystery that transcends and holds us both.

The plan of nature is a model for us who are learning the word yes. Nature allows changes and flows with them. Nature is patient and nonretaliatory. Nature is fully respectful of interconnections. Nature honors the light and the dark. Ecologist

Delusion happens when we see all that is from the viewpoint of the self. Enlightenment happens when we see ourselves from the viewpoint of the things in nature.

even when the tiger smiled, he was still a tiger.