Quotes About Adaptation

In the full sun, on clean mineral soil, the aspen seedlings will be the first to colonize the devastation.

Pecans have learned that there is strength in unity

To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don't speak the same language, I can't ask them directly and they won't answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviors. Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask.

The most highly regarded models predict that the climate of New England will become hostile to sugar maples within fifty years.

Mosses are the amphibians of the plant world. They

Unlike juicy fruits and berries, which invite you to eat them right away before they spoil, nuts protect themselves with a hard, almost stony shell and a green, leathery husk. The tree does not mean for you to eat them right away with juice dripping down your chin. They are designed to be food for winter, when you need fat and protein, heavy calories to keep you warm. They are safety for hard times, the embryo of survival.

Mosses are successful by any biological measure—they inhabit nearly every ecosystem on earth and number as many as 22,000 species. Like my niece finding small places to hide, mosses can live in a great diversity of small microcommunities where being large would be a disadvantage.

They succeed by matching the unique properties of their form to the physical laws of interaction between air and earth.

The plants adapt, the people adopt.

A species and a culture that treat the natural world with respect and reciprocity will surely pass on genes to ensuing generations with a higher frequency than the people who destroy it. The stories we choose to shape our behaviors have adaptive consequences

There was a time when I teetered precariously with an awkward foot in each of two worlds - the scientific and the Indigenous. But then I learned to fly. Or at least try. It was the bees that showed me how to move between different flowers - to drink the nectar and gather pollen from both. It is this dance of cross-pollination that can produce a new species of knowledge, a new way of being in the world. After all, there aren't two worlds, there is just this one good green earth.

They both took their napkins, unfolded them and set them on their laps. I did the same and watched as they arranged their utensils, following their lead. It was just another reminder of how much I didn't know. The

It is always easier to destroy a complex system than to selectively alter it.

But what if you don't like Chico?" she asked him, her brow furrowed. "Will you be there? Because if that's where you want to be, I'll find plenty to like.

You said I looked like a wild man." "You do." She grinned at him. "I'm used to it now." "What

how many episodes of being "not yourself" do you get before people figure out this is who you really are?

I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.

Our ability to adapt is amazing. Our ability to change isn't quite as spectacular.

You think you're in Connecticut, but you're in the jungle.

opposable thumbs than any prior.

For a tree that has many branches, even a small breeze will shake some loose.

To learn a different language is to learn a different way of living

But why bother trying to turn a monkey into a goat?

You cannot refuse to eat just because there's a chance of being choked.