Quotes about nature

One year we didn’t even see a single [whale] and then Jan said it was because the bay doesn’t belong to nature anymore. He says the bay has been taken over by the factories.”

Crushed them into the remotest recesses of their own minds, pressing out of them, like juices from the grape, all the false ardours and exaltations and undue self-values of the human soul, until they perceived themselves finite and small, specks and motes, moving with weak cunning and little wisdom amidst the play and inter-play of the great blind elements and forces.”

The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted, Northland Wild.

The natural world is full of irregularity and random alteration, but in the antiseptic, dust-free, shadowless, brightly lit, abstract realm of the mathematicians they like their cabbages spherical, please.

Trees, they die dead like people too. They need care too. The earth around us needs care. We come from earth, we eat from earth, and one day we must go back to earth, so why are we treating it so bad?

Colonizing space with enormous rockets will almost certainly not be a lifeline for them. For if they haven't learned to live here, how can they possibly survive in the distant Beyond? (XV)

Humans today think they can do whatever they like. They fancy themselves as masters, as architects of nature.

We, the trees. Our roots run all the way down to the heart of the earth, and we can feel the beat of her pulse. We inhale her breath. We taste her flesh. We live and die in the exact same spot, never moving from the land we occupy. Both prisoners and conquerors of time, we stand riveted to the ground yet soaring upward, reaching for the clouds. We adapt to all weathers, rain or shine, hurricanes or the dry harmattan winds. Our crowns merge with the sky's cotton-wool dreams. We are the link between Man and his past, his present, and his unpredictable future. (III)

We were here to last. We were here to spread our shade over the remotest lands. We were here so our foliage would murmur the secrets of the four corners of the world. But human beings have destroyed our hopes. No matter where in the world they are, they wage war on the forest. Our trunks crash to the ground with a sound like thunder. Our naked roots mourn the end of our dreams. You cannot destroy the forest without spilling blood.

As a bat, somewhere midway between a mammal and a bird, with my foxy-looking fangs and snout and my translucent wings, I harbor but one regret: having let Ebola escape from my belly. It was dormant in me until Man came and wreaked the splendour of the forest.

On those trips back to the Great Plains I always try to imagine the land before it was touched by rails and plows, fences and roads. I can still drive off the pavement of South Dakota highways, find a slight elevation in the prairie flatness, and look to a distant horizon, across untilled grassland, and with no barbed wire or telephone poles or dwellings to break the plane of earth and sky. It is at once majestic and intimidating. More than a century after the first white settlers began to arrive, the old Dakota Territory remains a place where nature rules.

We live on the edge, perched on the boundary between planet Earth and the rest of the Universe. ...Every human civilization has seen the stars, but no one has touched them. Our home on Earth is the opposite: messy... full of things... we touch and tweak... The physical world is full of startling variety... But this diversity isn't random. Our world is full of patterns.