Birds, butterflies, and flowers
All make one band of paramours.

-William Wordsworth, "Green Linnet"

"There are only three pleasures in life pure and lasting, and all are derived from inanimate things: books, pictures, and the face of nature."

-William Hazlitt

"The sad truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which thy are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedgerows can assume. Whosoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found... Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena--care not to understand the architecture of the Heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!"

-Herbert Spencer

"You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back."

-Horace (65­8 B.C.) Epistles, 1.10

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

-Greek proverb

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay, "First Fig"

"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, we will understand only what we are taught."

-Baba Dioum, Senegalese conservationist

"Conservation is sometimes perceived as stopping everything cold, as holding whooping cranes in higher esteem than people. It is up to science to spread the understanding that the choice is not between wild places or people. Rather, it is between a rich or an impoverished existence for Man."

-Thomas E. Lovejoy, World Wildlife Fund

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

-Helen Keller

"Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."

-Susan Ertz, "Anger in the Sky" (1943)

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Thanksgiving dinner's sad and thankless,
Christmas dinner's dark and blue,
When you stop and try to see it
From the turkey's point of view.

Sunday dinner isn't funny
Easter feasts are just bad luck,
When you see it from the viewpoint
Of the chicken or the duck.

Oh, how I once loved tuna salad,
Pork and lobsters, lamb chops, too,
Till I stopped and looked at dinner
From the dinner's point of view.

-Shel Silverstein, "Point of View"

"On the subject of wild mushrooms, it is easy to tell who is an expert and who is not: The expert is the one who is still alive."

-Donal Henahan

“I have endeavored to guard myself against the enthusiastic partiality which believes our civilization to be the most precious thing that we possess or could acquire, and thinks it must inevitably lead us to undreamt-of heights of perfection. I can at any rate listen without taking umbrage to those critics who aver that when one surveys the aims of civilization and the means it employs, one is bound to conclude that the whole thing is not worth the effort and that in the end it can only produce a state of things which no individual will be able to bear.”

-Sigmund Freud, Civilization And Its Discontents

"When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash ‹at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the Œnewness,¹ the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance."

-Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

"I care not for a man's religion whose dog or cat are not the better for it"

-Lincoln

"Without speculation, there is no original observation."

-Charles Darwin in a letter to Alfred Russel Wallace

the aim of life is to live and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware

-Henry Miller

"live in beauty... see in beauty... go in beauty..."

-Black Elk

"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."

-Thomas Edison, Harpers Magazine, 1890

"Volunteers are the backbone, heart, and soul of the restoration movement. And whatever the eventual results of their labors may be, working to revive damaged ecosystems is transforming and strengthening their relationship with the rest of nature."

-William K. Stevens, Miracle Under the Oaks

"I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn."

-Henry David Thoreau

"The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet."

-John F. Kennedy

"Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy. If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed. In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade. The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that. No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe."

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek

"...a monkey could climb into the jungle canopy at the foothills of the Andes and swing through 2,000 miles of continuous 200-foot-high forest before reaching the Atlantic coast."

-Eugene Linden, "Playing with Fire", Time, September 18, 1989

"I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines."

-Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

"The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)"

-Daniel Dennett, "Consciousness Explained"

COGDELL, GA : The Cogdell School Board banned the teaching of the controversial "Theory Of Math" in its schools Monday. "We are simply not confident of this mysterious process by which numbers turn, as if by magic, into other numbers," board member Gus Reese said. "Those mathematicians are free to believe 3 times 4 equals 12, but that dun [sic] give them the right to force it on our children." Under the new ruling, all math textbooks will carry a disclaimer noting that math is only one of many valid theories of number-manipulation.

-Georgia School Board Bans 'Theory Of Math", TheOnion

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at begin to change."

-Wayne Dyer

"All cold-blooded animals...spend an unexpectedly large proportion of their time doing nothing at all, or at any rate nothing in particular."

-Charles Elton

"Those who are really awake to the sights and sounds which the procession of the months offers them, find endless entertainment and instruction. Yet there are great multitudes who are present at as many as threescore and ten performances, without ever really looking at the scenery, or listening to the music, or observing the chief actors."

-O. W. Holmes

"If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another."

-Winston Churchill

"Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence."

-Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

"Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so called scientific knowledge."

-Thomas Edison

"What happened, what we think happened in distant memory, is built around a small collection of dominating images. In one of my own from the age of seven, I stand in the shallows of Paradise Beach, staring down at a huge jellyfish in water so still and clear that its every detail is revealed as though it were trapped in glass."

-Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist

"In fact, if there is any lesson I have learned in my years of following science, it is that nothing is as it seems. Instead, things are as they seem plus the details you are just beginning to notice. New truths rarely overturn old ones, they simply add nuanced brushstrokes to the portrait."

-Natalie Angier, "The Beauty of the Beastly"

"To trace the history of a river, or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble on divinity, which, like the cornice feeding the lake and the spring becoming a waterfall, feeds, spills, falls and feeds itself over and over again."

-Gretel Ehrlich, "River History"

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life: so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."

-Matt Cartmill.

"What is the origin of the urge, the fascincation that drives physicists, mathematicians, and presumably other scientists as well? Psychoanalysis suggests that it is sexual curiosity. You start by asking where little babies come from, one thing leads to another, and you find yourself preparing nitroglycerine or solving differential equations. This explanation is somewhat irritating, and therefore probably basically correct."

-David Ruelle, "Chance and Chaos"

"The vast possibilities of our great future will become realities only if we make ourselves responsible for that future."

-Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the U.S. Forest Service

Dec. 23

"But what pleasure it is to know that there is back county for them to retreat to, that nobody is going to push roads through that wilderness, that no RVs or trail bikes or tote goats will roar through those forests and stink up that clean air. The best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years of contact with the American wilderness is restraint, the willingness to hold our hand: to visit such places for our souls' good, but leave no tracks."

-Wallace Stegner, Crossing Into Eden, 1989

"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."

-Francis Bacon

At Christmas play and make good cheere,
For Christmas comes but once a yeere.

-Tusser, "Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry"

Heap on the wood!-the wind is chill;
But let it whistle as it will,
We'll keep our Christmas merry still.

-Sir Walter Scott

"But if there is a more worthy aim for us than to be drudges--if there are other uses in the things around us than their power to bring money--if there are higher faculties to be exercised than acquisitive and sensual ones--if the pleasures which poetry and art and science and philosophy can bring are of any moment--then it is desirable that the instinctive inclination which every child shows to observe natural beauties and investigate natural phenomena should be encouraged."

-Herbert Spencer, Education

"I remember Mimi asking me as a child to make a lens by curling my fingers around to my thumb. I closed one eye and, with the other, looked through my hand lens. I played with scale. Blades of grass were transformed into trees, a gravel bed became a boulder field. Small rivulets pouring over moss became the great rivers of our continent. My world was my own creation. It still is."

-Terry Tempest Williams

"The environmental and human effects of the modern way of thinking and structuring of relationships has been near-catastrophic, weakening ecosystems, and undermining the stability and sustainability of human communities. The great challenge that lies ahead of us is to come to grips with the dark side of the modern worldview‹to address the cold evil that comes of reducing all of nature and life to commercial resources that can be technologically mediated, manipulated, and reconstructed to suit the narrow objectives of utilitarianism and market efficiency."

-Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef

Dec. 30

"When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer."

-Dave Barry

"Something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for, are the true essentials of a happy and meaningful life."

-David Goodman

Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings a tune without words
And never stops at all.
And sweetest, in the gale, is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That keeps so many warm.
I've heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea
Yet, never, in extremity
It ask a crumb of me.

-Emily Dickinson

"The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."

-William Beebe, 1906

"Every child is born a naturalist. His eyes are, by nature, open to the glories of the stars, the beauty of the flowers, and the mystery of life."

-R. Search

"Science is not the only way, nor always the best way, to gain an understanding of the world in which we find ourselves... You don't need calculus to tell you whether a symphony or a poem has meaning for you. Science complements these other ways of knowing."

-from Science Matters, by Hazen and Trefil

"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we - you and I, and our government - must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow."

-Eisenhower's farewell speech, 1961

"For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver."

-Martin Luther

"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."

-William Ralph Inge, Outspoken Essays, 1922

"As a general rule, a modern biologist seeing an animal doing something to benefit another assumes either that it is being manipulated by the other individual or that it is being subtly selfish."

-George Williams

"There are three great themes in science in the twentieth century: the atom, the computer, and the gene."

-Harold Varmus, Director, US National Institute of Health

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."

-Steven Weinberg

"The brain is a three pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe a hundred billion light-years across."

-Marian C. Diamond

"And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him."

-Jack London, The Call of the Wild

I send thee a shell from the ocean-beach;
But listen thou well, for my shell hath speech.
Hold to thine ear
And plain thou'lt hear
Tales of ships.

-Charles Henry (John Paul) Webb (1834-1905), "With a Nantucket Shell"

"Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe."

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"Over the past 12 years I have learned that a tree needs space to grow, that coyotes sing down by the creek in January, that I can drive a nail into oak only when it is green, that bees know more about making honey than I do, that love can become sadness, and that there are more questions than answers."

-Sue Hubbell, A Country Year

"Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality."

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

"There was a revolution in biology in the mid 1960s, pioneered especially by two men, George Williams and William Hamilton. This revolution is best known by Richard Dawkins's phrase 'The Selfish Gene', and at its core lies the idea that individuals do not consistently do things for the good of their group, or their families, or even themselves. They consistently do things that benefit their genes, because they are all inevitably descended from those that did the same. None of your ancestors died celibate.... always, without exception, living things are designed to do things that enhance the chances of their genes or copies of their genes surviving and replicating."

-Matt Ridley, "The Origins of Virtue"

"In her book, The Edge of the Sea, Rachel Carson wrote that the 'place of the meeting of land and water...keeps alive the sense of continuing creation and the relentless drive of life. Each time I enter it, I gain some new awareness of its beauty and its deeper meanings, sensing that intricate fabric of life by which one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings.'"

-Suzanne Golas, "A Spiritual Connection," Blue Planet Quarterly, vol. 4, issue 2

"The lack of popular interest in the natural history sciences, failing some other cultivated interest, is unfortunate both for the individual and for the community....The natural surroundings of Californians are singularly rich and varied. A scientific interest in at least certain features of our natural environment, as for example the trees, shrubs or herbaceous plants, directs one to useful and agreeable intellectual activity. Accurate and detailed knowledge of even a small area lifts the possessor out of the commonplace and enables him directly or indirectly to contribute to the wellbeing and happiness of his community."

-Willis Jepson, Trees of California, 1923

"Insect species are so prolific, says the National Academy report, that two and a half acres may contain over 42,000 different species. Each tree may be home to over 1,700 insect species. A single square meter of leaf will often house 50 species of ants alone. Researchers have found three species of beetles, six species of mites, and three species of moth living in the fur of a single sloth."

-Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef

"But what pleasure it is to know that there is back county for them to retreat to, that nobody is going to push roads through that wilderness, that no RVs or trail bikes or tote goats will roar through those forests and stink up that clean air. The best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years of contact with the American wilderness is restraint, the willingness to hold our hand: to visit such places for our souls' good, but leave no tracks."

-Wallace Stegner, Crossing Into Eden, 1989

"When nature made the blue-bird she wished to propitiate both the sky and the earth, so she gave him the color of the one on his back and the hue of the other on his breast."

-John Burroughs

Jan. 23

"Gold, n.: A soft malleable metal relatively scarce in distribution. It is mined deep in the earth by poor men who then give it to rich men who immediately bury it back in the earth in great prisons, although gold hasn't done anything to them."

-Mike Harding

"A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt.... If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake."

-Thomas Jefferson, 1798, after the passage of the Alien & Sedition Act

"Man is nothing . . . unless he adventures. Either into the unknown of the world, of his environment. Or into the unknown of himself."

-D.H. Lawrence

"Ants in particular are arguably the most aggressive and warlike of all animals. They far exceed human beings in organized nastiness; our species is by comparison gentle and sweet-tempered. The foreign policy of ants can be summed up as follows: restless aggression, territorial conquest, and genocidal annihilation of neighboring colonies whenever possible. If ants had nuclear weapons, they would probably end the world in a week."

-Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants

"Whether hunting is right or wrong, a spiritual experience, or an outlet for the killer instinct, one thing it is not is a sport. Sport is when individuals or teams compete against each other under equal circumstances to determine who is better at a given game or endeavor. Hunting will be a sport when deer, elk, bears, and ducks are... given 12-gauge shotguns. Bet we'd see a lot fewer drunk yahoos (live ones, anyway) in the woods if that happened."

-R. Lerner, letter, Sierra, March-April 1991

"Real advances in understanding a subject like bird migration almost always come as partial or complete surprises...If scientific progress were predictable, it would become a sort of engineering, useful perhaps, but not much fun."

-Donald R. Griffin, Bird Migration, 1964

“Our senses are attuned, through evolution, to take notice of the shadows in the water, the sound of hooves in the distance, the honking of geese…We have survived as a species through the paying of attention, through this recognition of patterns in the world around us.”

-Jules Evens, “Return of the Coho,” Oct.-Dec. 2001 Bay Nature magazine

Jan. 30

"It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part."

-Wallace Stegner

"Mankind will not remain on Earth forever, but in its quest for light and space will at first timidly penetrate beyond the confines of the atmosphere, and later will conquer for itself all the space near the Sun."

-Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky

"Near by is the graceful loop of an old dry creek bed. The new creek bed is ditched straight as a ruler; it has been 'uncurled' by the county engineer to hurry the run-off. On the hill in the background are contoured strip-crops; they have been 'curled' by the erosion engineer to retard the run-off. The water must be confused by so much advice."

-Aldo Leopold, Sketches Here and There

"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

-R. Buckminster Fuller

"On a February morning, when a weather front is moving in off the Pacific but has not quite arrived, and the winds are changeable and gusty and clouds drive over and an occasional flurry of fine rain darkens the terrace bricks, this place conforms to none of the cliches about California with which they advertise the Sunshine Cities for the Sunset Years."

-Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water,
and I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

-Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"

Two birds fly past.
They are needed somewhere.

-Robert Bly

"Today's children, growing up on lawns and pavements, will not even have nostalgia to guide them, and soon the animals will not only be missing, but forgotten."

-Sara Stein, Noah's Garden

"Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained than that of the bees?"

-Montaignes Essays (1580-88)

"Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, dirty thing on the face of the earth and you should save it for someone you love."

-Butch Hancock

"One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one fine day."

-Aristotle (384-322 BC)

"This year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fall on the same day. As Air America Radio pointed out, 'It is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, and the other involves a groundhog.'"

-Air America Radio

"Along with William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin is Britain's greatest gift to the world. He was our greatest thinker."

-Richard Dawkins, Honourary President, Darwin Day

"We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do... It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it."

-Albert Schweitzer, The Philosophy of Civilization

"Love is the answer; but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions."

-Woody Allen

"He is an optician, daily having to do with the microscope, telescope, and other inventions for sharpening our natural sight, thus enabling us mortals (as I once heard an eccentric put it) liberally to enlarge the field of our original and essential ignorance."

-Herman Melville (1819­1891)

"[W]e seem ultimately always thrown back on individual ethics as the basis of conservation policy. It is hard to make a man, by pressure of law or money, do a thing which does not spring naturally from his own personal sense of right and wrong."

-Aldo Leopold, March 1937

"The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond our reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the only home we shall ever know; the only paradise we ever need-if we only had the eyes to see."

-Edward Abbey

“San Bruno mountain itself is a near miracle in latter-day California, a relatively isolated coastal landscape of native bunchgrasses, shrubs, and flowers…It's primeval form rises just south of San Francisco like the hulking grizzly bears that used to roam the state.”

-Susan Zakin, “Biodiversity at Our Doorstep,” April-June 2002 Bay Nature

"If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong."

-Robert Louis Stevenson

"Support your right to arm bears."

-Cleveland Amory

"These bears, being so hard to die, rather intimidate us all."

-Captain Meriwhether Lewis, 1805

"Field guides are instruments of the pleasure of pure knowledge."

-Von Baeyer

"I can think of no sincere, decent human being, male or female, young or old, saintly or sinful, who can resist the bicycle."

-William Saroyan

"Volunteers are the backbone, heart, and soul of the restoration movement. And whatever the eventual results of their labors may be, working to revive damaged ecosystems is transforming and strengthening their relationship with the rest of nature."

-William K. Stevens, Miracle Under the Oaks

"Scotch, because one doesn't solve the world's problems over white wine."

-anon.

"An environmental setting developed over millions of years must be considered to have some merit. Anything so complicated as a planet, inhabited by more than a million and a half species of plants and animals, all of them living together in a more or less balanced equilibrium in which they continually live and reuse the same molecules of the soil and air, cannot be improved by aimless and uninformed tinkering."

-E. F. Schumacher

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."

-Emerson

"Work is the curse of the drinking classes."

-Oscar Wilde

"That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm."

-Wallace Stegner

"The invasion of noxious weeds has created a level of destruction to America's environment and economy that is matched only by the damage caused by floods, earthquakes, wildfire, hurricanes, and mudslides."

-Bruce Babbitt, former Secretary of the Interior

"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."

-Martin Luther

March 4

"At home the great delight is to see the clover and grass now growing on places that were bare when we came. These small healings of the ground are my model accomplishment—everything else I do must aspire to that. While I was at that work the world gained with every move I made, and I harmed nothing."

-Wendell Berry

"Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'."

-Michael McClary

"The global environmental crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future….For civilization as a whole, the faith that is so essential to restore the balance now missing in our relationship with the earth is the faith that we do have a future. We can believe in that future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the earth is in the balance."

-Al Gore

March 7

"[I]f in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be "development" to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for. The sixth house would not be development at all, but rather it would be mere short-sighted stupidity. "Development" is like Shakespeare's virtue, "which grown into a pleurisy, dies of its own too-much." In objection to the dedication of the Gila as a permanent wilderness hunting ground, it has been truly said that a part of the area which would be "locked up" bears valuable stands of timber. I admit that this is true.
Likewise, might our sixth lot be a corner lot, and hence very valuable for a grocery store or a filling station. I still insist it is the last lot for a needed playground, and this being the case, I am not interested in grocery stores or filling stations, of which we have a fair to middling supply elsewhere.

-Aldo Leopold, "A Plea for Wilderness Hunting Gounds," Outdoor Life, November 1925

"One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret."

-Barry Lopez

"In my first interview with a Sierra bear we were frightened and embarrassed, both of us, but the bear's behavior was better than mine….After studying his appearance as he stood at rest, I rushed toward him to frighten him, that I might study his gait in running. But, contrary to all I had heard about the shyness of bears, he did not run at all; and when I stopped short within a few steps of him, as he held his ground in a fighting attitude, my mistake was monstrously plain. I was then put on my good behavior, and never afterward forgot the right manners of the wilderness."

-John Muir (1838-1914)

"I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and dither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke and there I lay myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man."

-Chuang-tsu

"After you have exhausted that there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night."

-Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

"I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back."

-Fred Allen

"The earth is a garden and each of us only need care for our own part for life to be breathed back into the planet, into the soil, into ourselves."

-John Jeavons

"This is a one line proof... if we start sufficiently far to the left."

-Cambridge University Math Department

"Naturalists are opportunists. They love not merely the subject but the whole idea of the subject. Their primary aim is to learn as much as possible about all aspects of the species that give them esthetic pleasure. Organisms are their totems, to be venerated and put to the service of science. Both of us belong to this second school of biology. We are professional naturalists, and a large part of our careers has been devoted to bringing ants into the mainstream of biology."

-Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants

"How fair is a garden amid the trials and passions of existence."

-Benjamin Disraeli

"This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever."

-Sigmund Freud (about the Irish)

"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

-Greek Proverb

"This is a simple thing to say, but the profound feeling of it made a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein. Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things—plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time."

-John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

"There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature-the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."

-Rachel Carson

On the ragged edge of the world
I'll roam.
And the home of the wolf
Will be my home.

-Robert N. Service

I discovered the secret of the sea
in meditation upon a dewdrop.

-Kahlil Gibran

"You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

-Wallace Stegner, Thoughts in a Dry Land, 1972

"When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive."

-Carl Sagan, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors"

"Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future."

-Wallace Stegner

"A sense of history should be the most precious gift of science and of the arts."

-Aldo Leopold

“...the endless wonder and excitement of nature's flair for individuality rather than conformity.”

-Justice William O. Douglas

"Scientists can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take Vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you're interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want . . . but they'll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy . . . try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science."

-Carl Sagan, "The Demon Haunted World"

"Still another misconception about the future is that it will be the same for all of us. While some warn that we are headed for disaster, the fact is that millions of people, perhaps half a billion or more, live disastrously impoverished lives today. Developed nations forget that most of the human race is often uncomfortable, usually hungry."

-Jacques Yves Cousteau

"The battle for conservation cannot be limited to the winning of new conquests. Like liberty itself, conservation must be fought for unceasingly to protect earlier victories.  There are always plenty of hogs who are trying to get natural resources for their own personal benefit! Public lands and parks, our forests and our mineral reserves, are subject to many destructive influences. We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people for the benefit of a few."

-President Harry S. Truman, December 1948 Inauguration of Everglades National Park

"I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later."

-Mitch Hedberg

“It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.”

-Edward Abbey, 1972

April is here
Blithest season of the year;
The little brook laughs as it leaps away;
The lambs are out on the hills at play.

-Eben E. Rexford

"If we do not begin to preserve them (native wildflowers), the time will come when they will become extinct and live only in history."

-Theodore Payne, 1916

April 4

"But what is the difference between literature and journalism? ...Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read. That is all."

-Oscar Wilde

"Garden with Mother Nature, not against her."

-Andy Wasowski, The Landscaping Revolution

"Wild places, in the ordinary sense of that phrase, are in precious short supply on planet Earth at the end of the twentieth century….[N]owadays you might step out of a dugout canoe at the Amazon headwaters and meet an Indian man wearing a red feather through his nose and a gimmee cap reading OKLAHOMA SOONERS."

-David Quammen

April 7

"The crisis we now face calls for passion ….Why shouldn't I be angry, emotional, passionate? Madmen and madwomen are wrecking this beautiful, blue-green, living Earth. Friends who hold nothing of value but a greasy dollar bill are tearing down pillars of evolution a-building for nearly four thousand years….We must break out of society's freeze on our passions. We must feel the tug of the moon, hear goose music overhead. We must love Earth and rage against her destroyers."

-Dave Foreman

"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."

-Mark Twain

"I think the Union army had something to do with it."

-General George Pickett, years afterward on why his charge at Gettysburg failed

"Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."

-Albert Camus

"Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person shared a little of what he is good at doing."

-Quincy Jones

"A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad."

-Bob Edwards

"Real advances in understanding a subject like bird migration almost always come as partial or complete surprises...If scientific progress were predictable, it would become a sort of engineering, useful perhaps, but not much fun."

-Donald R. Griffin, Bird Migration, 1964

"The Great Central Plain of California, during the months of March, April, and May, was one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step. Mints, gilias, nemophilas, castillejas, and innumerable compositae were so crowded together that, had ninety-nine percent of them been taken away, the plain would still have seemed to any but Californians extravagantly flowery. The radiant, honeyful corollas, touching and overlapping, and rising above one another, glowed in the living light like a sunset sky‹one sheet of purple and gold, with the bright Sacramento pouring through the midst of it from the north, the San Joaquin from the south, and their many tributaries sweeping in at right angles from the mountains, dividing the plain into sections fringed with trees."

-John Muir

"In my drawings of birds only did I interest [the tutor] Mr. Da Costa. He always commended my efforts, nay he even went farther, for one morning, while I was drawing a figure of the Ardea Herodias, he assured me the time might come when I should be a great American naturalist. However curious it may seem to the scientific world that these sayings from the lips of such a man should affect me, I assure you they had great weight with me…."

-John James Audubon (1785-1851)

Everything that lives,
Lives not alone, nor for itself.

-William Blake

"Men and nature must work hand in hand. The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men."

-Franklin Roosevelt, at the FDR Memorial

"The care of the refugees from the recent San Francisco fire, first for each other, then for their pets, was a noticeable feature. Dogs, cats, canary birds, parrots and monkeys were all most carefully cherished and protected while more material treasure was lost sight of."

-Sunset Magazine Editor, May 1906

Rest not! Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die.
Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Someday after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire."

-Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881-1955)

"I tried again, I failed better."

-Lao Tse

"Earth Day is the first completely international and universal holiday that the world has ever known. Every other holiday was tied to one place, or some political or special event. This Day is tied to Earth itself, and to the place of Earth in the whole solar system."

-Margaret Mead, 1977

"The pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing."

-George Orwell

"The clock indicates the moment... but what does eternity indicate?"

-Whitman

"When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it."

-Anatole France

"Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn't exist in a lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex or death. No wonder Americans like them so much."

-Michael Pollan, Second Nature, 1991

"After a time, habituated to spending so many hours a day on my bike, I became less and less interested in my friends. I could rely on it, which is more than I could say about my buddies."

-Henry Miller, "My Bike and Other Friends"

"Stars are not seen by sunshine."

-Spanish proverb

"Extinction of a single plant species may result in the disappearance of up to 30 other species of plants and wildlife."

-U.S. Forest Service

When that Aprille with his shoures sote               
The Droughte of March hath perced to the rote, 
And bathed every vein in swich licour                  
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;                 
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.             

When April, with its sweet showers,
has pierced the drought of March to the root,
and bathed every vein in such (sweet) liquor,
of which virtue the flower is engendered;
then folk begin to long to go on pilgrimages.

-Chaucer, Canterbury Tales

"I hate quotations."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one."

-Mother Teresa

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

-George Orwell

"Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgements using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat?
In essence, should we know better?"

-Peter Cheeke, PhD., Oregon State University Professor of Animal Agriculture

“If all the rich people in the world divided up their money among themselves there wouldn't be enough to go around.”

-Christina Stead

“Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”

-R. Buckminster Fuller

"Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."

-James Bovard

"When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist."

-Barbara Ehrenreich

"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"

-Albert Einstein

Black bees on the clover-heads drowsily clinging,
Where tall feathered grasses and buttercups sway;
And all through the fields a white sprinkle of daisies,
Open-eyed at the setting of day.

-Abba Woolson

"The problem with endangered species is: You clear up one and another one comes along."

-Manual Lujan, former Secretary of the Interior

"He who would make serious use of his life must always act as though he had a long time to live and must schedule his time as though he were about to die."

-Émile Littré

"Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another."

-Homer

"My grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping."

-Rita Rudner

"I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

-Pablo Picasso

"We democrats are deeply flawed people, we can be earnestly boring and awfully righteous about moral issues in faraway places. We can be weenies, capable of doing dumb things in the name of the common good. But we do stick to our guns. We believe in decency and public spiritedness and have refused to hitch our wagon to yahooism and have supported government as a necessary force for good. And we are passionate. This is a year for passion."

-Garrison Keillor

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."

-George Orwell

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

-Albert Einstein

"This looking business is risky. Once I stood on a humped rock on nearby Purgatory Mountain, watching through binoculars the great Autumn hawk migration below, until I discovered that I was in danger of joining the hawks on a vertical migration of my own. I was used to binoculars, but not, apparently, to balancing on humped rocks while looking through them."

-Annie Dillard

"To put the matter as simply as possible we, having entered our bug period as children, were blessed by never being required to abandon it."

-Bert Holldobler & Edward O. Wilson, Journey to the Ants

"Outer space is no place for a person of breeding."

-Lady Violet Bonham Carter

"Quantity of beauty required to launch a single ship: 1 Millihelen."

-Schott's Original Miscellany

"If we are saying that the loss of species is inherently bad-I don't think we know enough about how the world works to say that."

-Craig Manson, assistant secretary at the Interior Department who oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act. (in Sierra, March-April 2004)

"There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter."

-Franklin P. Adams

"And then to the rarest treasure, Golden Gate Park on a car-free Sunday morning, the air wet and clean, the meadows green with the promise of spring. Not a single automobile: The silence is deafening, you can actually hear the branches dripping moisture, squirrels scrambling through the underbrush -- and the birds! Hundreds of redbreasted robins bobbing across the lawns, now that there are no cars to frighten them. On Stanyan, the families are renting bikes and heading into the winding trails. Slowly it dawns on them that they can use the main drive and the roads. For once the world does not belong to the automobile. The bicycle is king again and the rider may go where fancy dictates without looking nervously over his shoulder. You are even allowed, for a few unrealistic minutes, to reflect on how pleasant life would be if the car were banned from San Francisco."

-Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/28/73

"Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization."

-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

"It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously."

-Peter Ustinov

"Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day."

-Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb

"Twenty percent more water than is now available will be needed to feed the additional three billion people who will be alive by 2025."

-World Commission on Water for the 21st Century

"An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language."

-Martin Buber

We need the sea.
We need a place to stand and watch and listen--
to feel the pulse-beat of the world
as the surf rolls in.

-David Brower

"One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret."

-Barry Lopez

I sing my heart out to the wide open spaces
I sing my heart out to the infinite sea
I sing my vision to the sky-high mountains
I sing my song to the free.

-Pete Townshend "Song is Over"

"Land is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plant, and animals."

-Aldo Leopold

“Any man whose errors take ten years to correct is quite a man.”

-J. Robert Oppenheimer

In June 'tis good to lie beneath a tree
While the blithe season comforts every sense,
Steeps all the brain in rest, and heals the heart,
Brimming it o'er with sweetness unawares.

-J. R. Lowell

“...when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental; men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost....All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre; the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum....The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

-H. L. Mencken, Baltimore Evening Sun, 1920

"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, we will understand only what we are taught."

-Baba Dioum, Senegalese conservationist

"Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee."

-F. Lee Bailey

"At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years."

-Arthur C. Clarke

"The probability of success is difficult to estimate, but if we never search, the chance of success is zero."

-Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison, scientists who in 1959 proposed a system of radiotelescopes to search for extraterrestrial life, a proposal that culminated in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)

"[We] must change our attitudes toward the ocean. We must regard it as no longer a mystery, a menace, something so vast and invulnerable that we need not concern ourselves with it….Instead we want to explore the themes of the ocean's existence—how it moves and breathes, how it experiences dramas and seasons, how it nourishes its hosts of living things, how it harmonizes the physical and biological rhythms of the whole earth, what hurts it and what feeds it—not least of all, what are its stories."

-Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910-1997)

“The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.”

-Martin Mull

I've watched you now a full half hour
Self poised upon that yellow flower.
And little butterfly! Indeed,
I know not if you sleep or feed.
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Has found you out among the trees.

-William Wordsworth

"Whether man is disposed to yield to nature or to oppose her, he cannot do without a correct understanding of her language."

-Jean Rostand

"I take the Biblical idea. God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees God says, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"

-Ann Coulter

Then what is the answer?--Not to be deluded by dreams.
To know that great civilizations have broken down into violence,
and their tyrants come, many times before.
When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose
  the least ugly faction; these evils are essential.
To keep one's own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted
   and not wish for evil; and not be duped
By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will
   not be fulfilled.
To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear
   the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand
Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars
   and his history....for contemplation or in fact...
Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness,
   the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man's pitiful confusions,
   or drown in despair when his days darken.

-Robinson Jeffers

"I did not want a simple, straightforward zoo, with the ordinary run of animals: the idea behind my zoo was to aid in the preservation of animal life….[S]cattered about, all over the world, are a host of fascinating small mammals, birds, and reptiles, and scant attention is being paid to their preservation, as they are neither edible nor wearable, and of little interest to the tourist who demands lions and rhinos."

-Gerald Durrell (1925-1995)

"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children."

-Audobon

O, when I am safe in my sylvan home,
I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome;
And when I am stretched beneath the pines,
Where the evening star so holy shines,
I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,
At the sophist schools and the learned clan;
For what are they all, in their high conceit,
When man in the bush with God may meet?

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"On one occasion I saw two of these monsters (whales) probably male and female, slowly swimming, one after the other, within less than a stone's throw of the shore (Terra Del Fuego), over which the beech tree extended its branches."

-Darwin's Voyage of a Naturalist

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

-Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"

"The bottom line rests on the earth."

-David Brower

"I should like to enjoy this summer flower by flower."

-Andre Gide

"...what one man can imagine, other men can do...."

-Jules Verne (1829-1905)

“I get sick of listening to straight people complain about, "Well, hey, we don't have a heterosexual-pride day, why do you need a gay-pride day?" I remember when I was a kid I'd always ask my mom: "Why don't we have a Kid's Day? We have a Mother's Day and a Father's Day, but why don't we have a Kid's Day?" My mom would always say, "Every day is Kid's Day." To all those heterosexuals that bitch about gay pride, I say the same thing: Every day is heterosexual-pride day! Can't you people enjoy your banquet and not piss on those of us enjoying our crumbs over here in the corner?”

-Rob Nash

"Fifteen hundred years is ample time in which to lose mutual comprehension. Iceland was colonized by the Norwegians at the end of the ninth century AD. Today's Icelanders, with considerable effort, can understand people from the Scandinavian peninsula, but the Scandinavians hardly understand the Icelanders. A thousand years is the minimum time span for a language to change so much that it becomes incomprehensible."

-Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, "The Great Human Diasporas"

Resist much
Obey little

-Whitman

"In the long run protection must come by the devices and resources of united effort, high intelligence, and careful handling. We must work for it, plan for it, strive for it. It is a noble object. If the beauty and glamour of the Golden Land in its youth can be preserved and harmonized with the practical phases of our civilization, then we may proudly say that our race was fit to enjoy it and to keep it, rising to the spirit and glad wonder of Nature in the valleys, mountains and canyons of our California."

-Willis Linn Jepson, 1917

“The best way out of a difficulty is through it.”

-anon.

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

-Iris Murdoch

"He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly."

-Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

"Those who are really awake to the sights and sounds which the procession of the months offers them, find endless entertainment and instruction. Yet there are great multitudes who are present at as many as threescore and ten performances, without ever really looking at the scenery, or listening to the music, or observing the chief actors."

-O.W. Holmes

"The idea that the GNP is not the measure of all things is shocking to most Americans. A nation that is used to having its landscapes partially obscured by billboards and its most serious news programs interrupted by jingles on behalf of some ridiculous luxury is perhaps beyond saving."

-Howard Ensign Evans, Life on a Little Known Planet, 1968

"Take away wilderness and you take away the opportunity to be American."

-Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

-Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Jack London's "The Iron Heel"

"Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws."

-Plato (427-347 B.C.)

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”

-John Muir

Across the lonely beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I;
And fast I gather, bit by bit,
The scattered driftwood, bleached and dry.
The wild waves reach their hands for it,
The wild wind raves, the tide runs high,
As up and down the beach we flit,
One little sandpiper and I.

-Celia Thaxter

"Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water."

-W.C. Fields

That sea beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.

-John Milton, Paradise Lost

"When the bee comes to your house, let her have beer; you may want to visit the bee's house some day."

-Proverb from the Congo

"The conservationist's most important task, if we are to save the earth, is to educate.”

-Peter Scott

"Nothing in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."

-Victor Hugo, French poet, novelist and dramatist

“Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.”

-Steven Wright

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime, you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books-

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

-Jane Hirshfield, "Tree", from Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2001

"When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half."

-Gracie Allen

"The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity."

-Harlan Ellison

"There is the life of the plankton in almost endless variety; there are the many kinds of fish, both surface and bottom living; there are the hosts of different invertebrate creatures on the sea-floor; and there are those almost grotesque forms of pelagic life in the oceans depths. Then there are the squids and cuttlefish, and the porpoises, dolphins and great whales."

-Sir Alister Hardy, "The Open Sea" 1956

“It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.”

-George Burns

“Cockroaches thrive in British Columbia , as they do almost everywhere. The common species seems to be the German roach....They are in everything, even the food. On this trip I had them served to me in three different styles, alive in strawberries, a la carte with fried fish, and baked in a biscuit.”

-A. N. Caudell in the journal Entomological News, 1903

“I have a most peaceable disposition. My desires are for a modest hut, a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, very fresh milk and butter, flowers in front of my window and a few pretty trees by my door. And should the good Lord wish to make me really happy, he will allow me the pleasure of seeing about six or seven of my enemies hanged upon those trees.”

-Heinrich Heine

"If the world is cold make it your business to light fires"

-Horace Traubel

"All is a miracle. The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred million of worlds around a million of suns, the activity of light, the life of animals; all are grand and perpetual miracles."

-Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet)

"If civilization is going to invade the waters of the earth, let it be first of all to carry a message of respect-respect for all life."

-Jacques-Yves Cousteau

"In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia."

-Charles A Lindbergh, declaring that if he were a young man he would choose a career that kept him more in contact with nature than with science.

"Unless someone like you cares an awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

-Dr. Suess

"The Bay Area is incalculably fortunate to have a unique oasis of biodiversity at San Bruno Mountain. However, as is the case with so many other global treasures, this great fortune is not being handled with adequate care. In my book, The Diversity of Life, I highlighted San Bruno Mountain as one of eighteen global biodiversity "hotspots" in need of immediate protection, along with the Usambara mountain forests of Tanzania, the Colombian Choco, Madagascar, and associated problems, principally the invasion of non-native species. More development, as is currently proposed, will further fragment what is home to hundreds of plant and animal species, including several that live nowhere else. Current Habitat Conservation Plan provisions are insufficient to preserve this rich biodiversity. It is imperative that all the open space that remains on San Bruno Mountain be saved. We can leave our descendants a sorely degraded environment and an example of abuse and exploitation, or we can leave a rich legacy of respectful stewardship--it is our choice. I urge all Californians to take a stand in favor of conserving San Bruno Mountain."

Sincerely yours,
Edward O. Wilson
University Research Professor, Harvard University

-San Francisco Chronicle Op­Ed; January 6, 1999

"Garden with Mother Nature, not against her."

-Andy Wasowski, The Landscaping Revolution

"All is a miracle. The stupendous order of nature, the revolution of a hundred million of worlds around a million of suns, the activity of light, the life of animals; all are grand and perpetual miracles."

-Voltaire

"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."

-Martin Luther

“Whether man is disposed to yield to nature or to oppose her, he cannot do without a correct understanding of her language.”

-Jean Rostand

"The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught."

-Marquis de Vauvenargues

"Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons."

-R. Buckminster Fuller

"A few years ago a gentleman came up to me when I was mounting wasps at a picnic table in a Missouri state park. 'What is the purpose of a wasp?' he asked. Had I been a lepidopterist, he doubtless would have asked the purpose of a butterfly, though I'm not sure what he would have asked had I been an anthropologist."

-Howard Ensign Evans

"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons."

-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"Every thing that lives is holy."

-William Blake

You sea! I resign myself to you also... I guess what you mean,
I behold from the beach your crooked inviting fingers,
I believe you refuse to go back without feeling of me...

-Whitman

"I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being."

-Abraham Lincoln

"Many would be cowards if they had courage enough."

-Thomas Fuller

"Last year I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish."

-Steven Wright

"Unless someone like you cares an awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

-Dr. Suess

“The place where there are the most cows and the least milk and the most rivers and the least water in them, and where you can look the farthest and see the least.”

-H. L. Mencken, on Texas

"The study of Nature is intercourse with the highest mind."

-Agassiz

"Lawyers as a group are no more dedicated to justice than a private utility is dedicated to giving light."

-David Melinkoff

Such stillness...
The cries of the cicadas
Sink into the rocks.

-Matsuo Basho (1644­1694)

"Thirty-five years ago there was little trade on Kan Kun island, in the remotest corner of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. It was a series of pristine white sandbars in a calm blue sea. Only three fishermen lived there, and only for part of the year. But in the early 1970s it was discovered by international bankers, who thought they had found financial paradise, and the world's first purpose-built giant holiday resort was born. The ancient Mayan name Kan Kun - "nest of vipers" - was softened to tourist-friendly Cancun."

-by John Vidal, Guardian Weekly of 11-17 Sept 2003

"No man has ever seen the sun, or ever will. What we call ‘sunlight' is only a narrow span of the entire solar spectrum ­the immensely broad band of vibrations which the Sun ...pours into space."

-Arthur C. Clarke, By Space Possessed, 1993

"The clock indicates the moment... but what does eternity indicate?"

-Whitman

"Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just...."

-Thomas Jefferson

"Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them."

-Bill Vaughan

"We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything."

-Thomas A. Edison

"What's another word for Thesaurus?"

-Steven Wright

"Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?"

-George Wallace

"Music is essentially useless, as life is."

-George Santayana

His labor is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee's experience
Of clovers and of noon!

-Emily Dickinson

"There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science."

-Louis Pasteur

Q: What do you get if you divide the circumference of a pumpkin by its diameter?

A: Pumpkin pi.

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Study without thinking is worthless; thinking without study is dangerous."

-Confucius

"Had I learned to fiddle, I should have done nothing else."

-Samuel Johnson

"Gentleman...look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds; nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we, are godless and foolish, and we don't understand that life is a paradise, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep."

-Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."

-Albert Einstein

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."

-Lao-Tse

"Wanting to reform the world without discovering one's true self is like trying to cover the world with leather to avoid the pain of walking on stones and thorns. It is much simpler to wear shoes."

-Ramani Maharshi

The shore is an ancient world,
for as long as there has been an earth
and sea there has been this place
of the meeting of land and water.

-Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea

"I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least..."

-Whitman

"The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive."

-Robert Heinlein

"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children."

-Audubon

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

-William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree (l. 1­4)

"For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

-Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

"I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor. When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly. We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days. The incident made a deep impression on me. I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures."

-Christian Barnard, surgeon

Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
Oh how I wish he'd go away.

-Hughes Mearns

We shall never cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time.

-T.S. Eliot

"Cultural historian Elias Canetti once remarked that each of us is a king on a field of corpses. If we were to stop for a moment and reflect on the number of creatures and earth's resources, and the materials we have expropriated and consumed in our lifetime, we would be appalled at the carnage and depletion that has been required to secure our existence."

-Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef

"The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

-Oscar Wilde

"The higher the buildings, the lower the morals."

-Noel Coward

"Incidentally, entomologists are always delighted to find people who can spell the name of their profession properly. I have always especially resented being called an antomologist, when I specialize in wasps, not ants. Antimologist is even worse, since it implies I am against ­ologies, which I usually am not. An etamologist, I suppose, is one who has just eaten a scientist."

-Howard Ensign Evans

"We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features- the seacoast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and decaying trees, the thundercloud.... We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander."

-Henry Thoreau

"Mustard's no good without roast beef."

-Chico Marx

"In democracy it's your vote that counts; In feudalism it's your count that votes."

-Mogens Jallberg

"The best measure of a just society is whether you'd be willing to be thrown into it at random."

-John Komlos

"As the true method of knowledge is experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be that which experiences."

-Blake

"I do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many."

-Theodore Roosevelt

"There can't be good living where there is not good drinking."

-Benjamin Franklin

If you want to live and thrive,
let the spider run alive.

-American Quaker saying

Work—for some good, be it ever so slowly;
Cherish some flower, be it ever so lowly…

-Frances Sargent Osgood, Laborare est Orare

“Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”

-James Madison

"It gets harder every year for me to drive south from San Francisco along El Camino Real, along the Bayshore Freeway, or even along Highway 280. The memory of open shoreline, of acres of waving grasses, of marshland from which birds arose by the thousands like a cannon shot, of fruit trees in bloom, of one lone tannery, of a big red barn in a vast field--all now replaced by slurbs or miles of industrial slum--is painful to me. The loss eats at my soul. The quality of life here has become so diminished by population pressures, it sometimes seems almost unbearable."

-Margo Patterson Doss, A Walker's Yearbook

"In one of my latest conversations with Darwin, he expressed himself very gloomily on the future of humanity, on the ground that in our modern civilization natural selection had no play, and the fittest did not survive."

-Alfred Russell Wallace, 1872

"Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe."

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"Even he, to whom most things that most people would think were pretty smart were pretty dumb, thought it was pretty smart."

-Douglas Adams

"Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them."

-Samuel Butler

"Virtue is its own punishment."

-Aneurin Bevan

"Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most."

-Joseph Wood Krutch

"According to the California Oak Foundation, 331 wildlife species -birds, mammals, amphibians, and reptiles- use oak woodlands for food, cover, and reproduction. Over 5,000 species of insects, including 7 butterfly species, are also part of this extensive web of life."

-Nancy Bauer, The Habitat Garden Book

"You won't have an economy on a dead planet."

-David Brower

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."

-Ernest Rutherford

"The dog was created especially for children. He is the god of frolic."

-Henry Ward Beecher

"It is much easier to show compassion to animals. They are never wicked."

-Haile Selassie

"But if there is a more worthy aim for us than to be drudges--if there are other uses in the things around us than their power to bring money--if there are higher faculties to be exercised than acquisitive and sensual ones--if the pleasures which poetry and art and science and philosophy can bring are of any moment--then it is desirable that the instinctive inclination which every child shows to observe natural beauties and investigate natural phenomena should be encouraged."

-Herbert Spencer, Education

"The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible."

-George Burns

"Beekeeping is a business that requires the greatest amount of attention to details.... The good beekeeper is generally more or less cranky."

-C. P. Dadant

"Real advances in understanding a subject like bird migration almost always come as partial or complete surprises...If scientific progress were predictable, it would become a sort of engineering, useful perhaps, but not much fun."

-Donald R. Griffin, Bird Migration, 1964

"Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life."

-Bertrand Russell, "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish"

"Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else."

-James M. Barrie

"In time, and with water, everything changes."

-Leonardo da Vinci

"All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance."

-Edward Gibbon

"The fundamental dilemma is balancing the needs of our natural systems and lands with the impulse to convert that bounty for short-term economic gain."

-Bob Walker

"If you ever crawl inside an old hollow log and go to sleep, and while you're in there some guys come and seal up both ends and then put it on a truck and take it to another city, boy, I don't know what to tell you."

-Jack Handey

"My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists."

-Jean Rostand

A little beetle passed me by.
He didn't make much fuss,
He ran around my garden
Like a tiny yellow bus.

-Slyvia Gerditz