Quotes About Growth

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.

Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child. —JAMES LOVELOCK

For the bitch I was. For the attentive person I wasn't.

My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

Let other trees do the work of the world. Let the Beech stand, where still it holds its ground

Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

Out in the yard, all around the house, the things they've planted in years gone by are making significance, making meaning, as easily as they make sugar and wood from nothing, from air, and sun, and rain. But humans hear nothing.

it. There is great, joyous, and essential work to do. But first a person needs to graduate from endless self-love.

Branches, combing the sun, laughing at gravity, still unfolding. Something moves at the base of the motionless trunks. Nothing. Now everything. This, a voice whispers, from very nearby. This. What we have been given. What we must earn. This will never end.

People want a better story than they get." The wild-haired sadhu leans forward so fast he almost pitches out of his wheelchair. "Yes! And what do all good stories do?" There are no takers. Neelay holds up his arms and extends his palms in the oddest gesture. In another moment, leaves will grow from his fingers. Birds will come and nest in them. "They kill you a little. They turn you into something you weren't.

Sih Hsuin gasps. "Look the color!" The color of greed, envy, freshness, growth, innocence. Green, green, green, green, and green.

Chestnut is quick: By the time an ash has made a baseball bat, a chestnut has made a dresser.

Art and acorns: both profligate handouts that go mostly wrong.

Something marvelous is happening underground, something we're just starting to learn how to see.

He's never really thought about the many miles a tree travels, in smallest cursive increments, each hour of every day. Forever in motion, these stationary things.

He decides, for whatever years are left to him, to capture the tree and see what the thing looks like, sped up to the rate of human desire.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time.

To hope, which finds roots in the most infertile of soils.

So obvious. Exponential growth inside a finite system leads to collapse. But people don't see it. So the authority of people is bankrupt.

As for the trees themselves, water that flows into a giant redwood through its roots takes two weeks or longer to reach the top of the tree, moving slowly upward through the tree's sapwood.

Lichens are small organisms that often grow on bark and on rocks. A lichen (sounds like "liken") is a fungus growing in association with a species of alga or cyanobacterium, forming a single combined organism.

Shipments of coal from Newcastle upon Tyne, an expanding coal port on the Tyne River in the northeast of England, increased accordingly from about thirty-five thousand tons in the midsixteenth century to about four hundred thousand tons by 1625. In two generations, the historian J. U. Nef concludes, "the coal trade from the Tyne had multiplied twelvefold."22

the American population was increasing rapidly, from 5.3 million in 1800 to 12.9 million in 1830, and from sixteen states in 1800 to twenty-four in 1830, most of the increase across the mountains in the trans-Appalachian west. The river steamboat from 1807, the Erie Canal between Albany, New York, and the Great Lakes from 1825, railroads from 1829, penetrated the American wilderness and fostered its settlement. These new places and people needed lighting.

a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child.