In the space of a few generations we have laid waste to paradise. The Tall-grass Prairie has been transformed into a corn factory where wildlife means the exotic pheasant. The Shortgrass Prairie is a grid of carefully fenced cow pastures and wheatfields. The Passenger Pigeon is no more; the last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The endless forests of the East are tame woodlots. With few exceptions, the only virgin deciduous forest there is in tiny museum pieces of hundreds of acres. Fewer than one thousand Grizzlies remain. The last three condors left in the wild were captured and imprisoned in the Los Angeles Zoo. (An expensive reintroduction effort has since been started.) Except in northern Minnesota and northwestern Montana, wolves are known as scattered individuals drifting across the Canadian and Mexican borders. Four percent of the peerless Redwood Forest remains and the ancient forests of Oregon are all but gone. The tropical cats have been shot and poisoned from our Southwestern borderlands. The subtropical Eden of Florida has been transmogrified into hotels and citrus orchards. Domestic cattle have grazed bare and radically altered the composition of the grassland communities of the West, displacing Elk, Moose, Bighorn Sheep, and Pronghorn and leading to the virtual extermination of Grizzly Bear, Gray Wolf, Cougar, and other ‘varmints’. Dams choke most of the continent’s rivers and streams. Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching
If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee
You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away – all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed
No settled family or community has ever called its home place an environment. None has ever called its feeling for its home place ‘biocentric’ or ‘anthropocentric’. None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as ‘ecological’, deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of ‘ecology’ and ‘ecosystems’. But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people. Wendell Berry
I am at two with nature. Woody Allen
Whatsoever is contrary to Nature is contrary to reason. And whatsoever is contrary to reason is absurd. Baruch Spinoza
Nature abhors a vacuum. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
What is necessary to keep providing good care to nature has completely fallen into ignorance during the materialism era. Rudolf Steiner
All of nature begins to whisper its secrets to us through its sounds. Sounds that were previously incomprehensible to our soul now become the meaningful language of nature. Rudolf Steiner
Nature is the source of all material things: the maker, the means of making, and the things made. Bhagavad Gita: Krishna’s Dialogue on the Soul 13:20
For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know
What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no. A E Housman, Last Poems, 1922
Almost
All the wise world is little else in nature
But parasites and sub-parasites. Ben Jonson, Volpone, 1606
Wonder ... and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that united the various appearances of nature. Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, 1795
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life. Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
Nature, is it? Don’t you Nature me, boy. I mean I’m as mellow as the next bastard but where is the pleasure in it? Where is the pleasure? Rab C Nesbitt, Further, BBC 1994
Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,
That’s a’ the learning I desire. Robert Burns
Nature’s law,
That man was made to mourn! Robert Burns
I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union. Robert Burns, To a Mouse
Those who are contented and at ease when the occasion comes and lives in accord with the course of Nature cannot be affected by sorrow or joy. This is what the ancients called release from bondage. Those who cannot release themselves are so because they are bound by material things. Chung Tzu, Chuang ch6
Exercise fully what you have received from Nature without any subjective viewpoint. In one word – be absolutely vacuous. ibid.
Nature, so far as it is the object of scientific research, is a collection of facts governed by laws: our knowledge of nature is our knowledge of laws. William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics, 1834
Man is the interpreter of nature, science the right interpretation. William Whewell, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 1840
Nature is usually wrong. James McNeill Whistler, Mr Whistler’s Ten O’Clock
Nature is always wise in every part. Edward Lord Thurlow, 1781-1829
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences. Robert G Ingersoll
You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back. Horace, Epistles
The birds chant melody on every bush,
The snakes lies rolled in the cheerful sun,
The green leaves quiver with the cooling wind
And make a chequered shadow on the ground ...
But when ye have the honey ye desire
Let not this wasp outlive, us both to sting. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus II iii 22-25 & 131-132, Tamora
O mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities,
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor ought so good but, strained from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet II ii 15-20, Nurse to Peter
Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions. William Shakespeare, I Henry IV III i 25-26, Hotspur to Glyndwr
But as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly. William Shakespeare, As You Like It II iv 51-52, Touchstone to Rosalind
To hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature. William Shakespeare, Hamlet III ii 25
In nature there’s no blemish but the mind.
None can be called deformed but the unkind. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night III iv 359-360
Thou, nature, art my goddess. To thy law
My services are bound. William Shakespeare, The History of King Lear I ii 1, Edmund
How sometimes nature will betray its folly,
Its tenderness, and make itself a pastime
To harder bosoms! William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale I ii @153, Leontes
Full many a glorious morning I have seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 33