“Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means "to draw out." What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us 'open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, plan

“We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyones arguing over where they're going to sit”

“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.”



“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.

And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another. The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing. Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known. Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth.

The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor. Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.” 
― Wendell Berry

“Why worry about minor little details like clean air, clean water, safe ports and the safety net when Jesus is going to give the world an "Extreme Makeover: Planet Edition" right after he finishes putting Satan in his place once and for all?”

“To me, a witch is a woman that is capable of letting her intuition take hold of her actions, that communes with her environment, that isn't afraid of facing challenges.” 

We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.” 

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.” 

“The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.” 

“To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”

“Landscapes of great wonder and beauty lie under our feet and all around us. They are discovered in tunnels in the ground, the heart of flowers, the hollows of trees, fresh-water ponds, seaweed jungles between tides, and even drops of water. Life in these hidden worlds is more startling in reality than anything we can imagine. How could this earth of ours, which is only a speck in the heavens, have so much variety of life, so many curious and exciting creatures?”

“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.

“All my life I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”
― Kathryn Stockett, The Help

“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. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It's powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that's happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time. A hundred years ago we didn't have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park / Congo

“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.”

“We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike

Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Here grow the wallflower and the violet. The squirrel will come and sit upon your knee, the logcock will wake you in the morning. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill. Of all the upness accessible to mortals, there is no upness comparable to the mountains.

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.

People say to me so often, 'Jane how can you be so peaceful when everywhere around you people want books signed, people are asking these questions and yet you seem peaceful,' and I always answer that it is the peace of the forest that I carry inside.

You think Nature is some Disney movie? Nature is a killer. Nature is a bitch. It's feeding time out there 24 hours a day, every step that you take is a gamble with death. If it isn't getting hit with lightning today, it's an earthquake tomorrow or some deer tick carrying Lime disease. Either way, you're ending up on the wrong end of the food chain.

Mountains inspire awe in any human person who has a soul. They remind us of our frailty, our unimportance, of the briefness of our span upon this earth. They touch the heavens, and sail serenely at an altitude beyond even the imaginings of a mere mortal.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.Nature does nothing uselessly.

And then, the unspeakable purity and freshness of the air! There was just enough heat to enhance the value of the breeze, and just enough wind to keep the whole sea in motion, to make the waves come bounding to the shore, foaming and sparkling, as if wild with glee.
Anne Bronte (1820 - 1849), Agnes Grey

Our land is more valuable than your money. As long as the sun shines and the waters flow, this land will be here to give life to men and animals; therefore, we cannot sell this land. It was put here for us by the Great Spirit and we cannot sell it because it does not belong to us.
, Blackfoot chief (c. 1880)

Nature is just enough; but men and women must comprehend and accept her suggestions.

The refreshing pleasure from the first view of nature, after the pain of illness, and the confinement of a sick-chamber, is above the conceptions, as well as the descriptions, of those in health.

Ann Radcliffe (1764 - 1823), The Mysteries of Udolpho, 1764

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit. ~Nelson Henderson.

“You know why trees smell the way they do?” Murphy asked, looking up from her hammering. “Sap?” Logan guessed. “Chlorophyll?” Murphy shook her head. “Stars. Trees breathe in starlight year after year, and it goes deep into their bones. So when you cut a tree open, you smell a hundred years’ worth of light. Ancient starlight that took millions of years to reach earth. That’s why trees smell so beautiful and old.” ~ By Frances O’Roark Dowell in Where I’d like to be

We often forget that "we are nature." Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, what we are really saying is we've lost our connection to ourselves. ~ Andy Goldsworthy

"When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." - Aldo Leopold

"How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.

To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.

“A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.” 
― Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

“It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you -- are you watching yourself in me?' Most travelers hurry too much...the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling...you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you'll be there.” 
― Lawrence Durrell, Spirit Of Place: Letters And Essays On Travel

Thomas Merton wrote, “there is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. 

I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock-more than a maple- a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

“Sometimes, when one is moving silently through such an utterly desolate landscape, an overwhelming hallucination can make one feel that oneself, as an individual human being, is slowly being unraveled. The surrounding space is so vast that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep a balanced grip on one's own being. The mind swells out to fill the entire landscape, becoming so diffuse in the process that one loses the ability to keep it fastened to the physical self. The sun would rise from the eastern horizon, and cut it's way across the empty sky, and sink below the western horizon. This was the only perceptible change in our surroundings. And in the movement of the sun, I felt something I hardly know how to name: some huge, cosmic love.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show.
I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.
I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

Our nature is obscured by work done by the compulsion of want or fear. The mother reveals herself in the service of her children, so our true freedom is not the freedom from action but freedom in action, which can only be attained in the work of love.

The higher nature in man always seeks for something which transcends itself and yet is its deepest truth; which claims all its sacrifice, yet makes this sacrifice its own recompense. This is man's dharma, man's religion, and man's self is the vessel The emancipation of our physical nature is in attaining health, of our social being in attaining goodness, and of our self in attaining love.

How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and morning dew.

Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.

Nature is looking and comprehending the earth’s most beautiful gift.

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature’s most beautiful gift.

The surrounding environment is the best erudite master to teach us the fundamental laws of nature and the basics of living in life.

Nature does nothing uselessly.

When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money.

“Nature" doesn't really have intentions, per se. Nature is a drunk waking up from a weekend bender, ambling through a messy kitchen in a pair of mismatched slippers, seeing its car in the neighbor's pool and saying, "Ah good. It was dirty. Just the thing.” 

“I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and filled myself up with the breeze from the valley. Then I let it out slow so it could get back to its travels, with a little bit of me added to it.” 

“As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element.” 

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.” 

“We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl


“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.”
― Gaston Bachelard

“The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.”
― Henri Poincaré

“I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.”
 “If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”

THE forest paths are muddy, after the rain;

The meadows are soaked through and through again.

The blackbirds in the yellow osiers sing,

The yellow osiers good for basketing.

I have been drinking at the rusty spout,

That glints with moss and spits the cold source out.

I would have loved you in this mossy place,

In days gone by, because of your sweet face.

But now I smile, as I my pipe begin,

The dreams I had were like magpies that spin.

I have reflected. And read novels, then

Verses from Paris, made by clever men.

Ah! they are far from sources in the rocks,

Where, among withered leaves, bathe brown woodcocks.

They should be here to see the huts I know,

Left ruined in the forest long ago.

And I would show them silver snipe, and thrushes,

Mild-mannered peasants, shining holly-bushes.

Then they would smoke their pipe, smile, and be glad,

And, if they suffer still, for men are sad,

They would be healed much when they heard the noise

Of pointed hawks that over farm-yards poise.

by francis james

 

In the lyric tide of April, in the month of daffodils,
In the gush of the gold of morning I came to the heart of the hills,--
Came by a virgin pathway that the vernal goddess trod
On her singing way from the southland over the sleeping sod.
And a chorus of choiring voices ever anigh me spake,
The tawny throat by the rillside, the red-breast out of the brake,
The pipers hid in the rushes, with their clear "Chee-weep! chee-weep!"
And the fleet wind-children chanting their runes of the upper deep.
A flush of rose and of amber, of sapphire and beryl shade,--
These were the woven glories that the waking morn displayed;
Beauty above and about me! Fluctuant? fading? nay!
Glowing, flowing, and growing in the rising flood of the day!
The soul within me was buoyant, and the spirit in me was one
With the throb of the great earth-passion, with the thrill of the vital sun.
I felt in my veins the pulsing, I knew in my thews the power
That stirred in the root of the grasses, that breathed through the lips of the flower.
If but for the span of a moment I swam in the aura of flame;
I caught the rapt secret of being clothed by the Ineffable Name.
And chastened with wonder and strengthened to meet life's beleaguering ills
I went, like a bondman unfettered, adown from the heart of the hills
by clinton scollard

  1. Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey
     "[Abbey's] perception of the desert is determinedly frameless and 
     unconventional, as is his commentary on civilization. A work steadily gaining
     status as a classic."

  2. Walden; Or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau
     "A world-famous text on simple living as the means and the expression of
     enlightenment, and one of the purest appreciations of place and the
     natural that we have."

  3. A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
     "One of the modern classics, setting forth in elegantly economical prose the
     author's own journey toward ecological understanding, the necessity of
     wilderness to civilization, and (perhaps most revolutionary of his ideas) the
     need for a 'land ethic.'"

  4. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
     "Observation of nature here opens up profound questions about life and
     death, meaning, and identity. To the author, Tinker Creek in Virginia
     represents the universe in all its spiritual complexity."

  5. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
     "A major text that is still valuable, still urgent.  Carson assembled the
     evidence painstakingly, showing by careful reasoning and ecological insight
     just what a chemicalized environment would mean. History and further
     investigation have borne out her analysis."

  6. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, Terry Tempest Williams
     "...as the Great Salt Lake rose to historically unprecedented levels,
     drowning bird-productive lakeside marshes in salt water, the author's
     mother sank toward death from cancer. Williams weaves these two
     dimensions together masterfully and movingly."

  7. New and Selected Poems, Mary Oliver
     Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Mary Oliver is
     best known for her poetry that speaks eloquently and clearly about the
     natural world.

  8. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, Barry Lopez
     "The author travels over great stretches of the Arctic, meditating upon the
     great choice that is behind our eyes."

  9. The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich
     "An appreciation of the vastness and rigor of Wyoming's High Plains
     country, and of the people whose lives have been shaped by its elemental
     forces."

 10. The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, Henry Beston
     "A year on the Great Beach of Cape Cod: one of our literature's classic
     evocations of just what a year might naturally mean."

As I walk across the earth,
thousands of things I get to see.
Birds fly high, soaring higher,
and on the flowers I hear the buzz of bees.

The sun at the dawn, rises within the hills.
Mountains covered with snow,
shining like the crown of silver. 
And the waves touching the cliffs.
The waterfall flowing down
the green-blue mountains.
Rivers forming a dream delta 
before entering the sea.

And while walking on the beach at night,
I feel the cool and sweet smelling breeze.
The slashing sound still feels like
the sound of love and peace.
The moon over the sea,
shining like a ball of gold.
And in every step my eyes hold wonder.
I bend on my knee
to thank the mother earth,
And is the truth.
it's a great pleasure for me,
to live in this wonderland.

Through the trees the sunlight filters,
Glinting off the snow, caressing the water,
While water falls noisily nearby.

The water twists around, winding,
The stream continues on an endless path,
While the rocks remain frozen, solid obstacles.

The light is fleeting, so catch it fast,
For it shimmers, waning, 
And the whole forest shimmers too.

The snow clinging to the trees won't always be there,
And as the sunlight wavers,
Frost falls soundlessly to the ground.

Piles of snow beneath my boots
chilly winds blowing everywhere
snow keeps mounting on the posts
on the windows and on the roads
shovels outside, 
soups inside
hot and rich, 
chicken and corn
coming back from all the work
this is what I look for
the warm chestnuts,
the cracking fire
this is my winter warmth

The air is cool, the breeze is light.
The clouds in the sky are fluffy and white.

The flowers open to show their bright faces,
as the garden snail alongside paces.

The trees unfold their bright green leaves.
The spider a silken web she weaves.

The birds sing their notes high and clear.
Cheer up! Cheer up! Spring is here!

Bible Verses about Nature...

Job 12:7-9 - But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you.  Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this?

Matthew 6:26 - Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?

Matthew 6:28-29 - See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.

Genesis 9:12-13 - And God said, "This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.

Nehemiah 9:6 You alone are the LORD. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything, and the multitudes of heaven worship you.

Psalm 104:24 - O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom has thou made them all: the earth is full of your riches.

Isaiah 42:5 - Thus says God the LORD, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which comes out of it; he that gives breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein:

Romans 1:20 - For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

Colossians 1:16,17 - For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:  And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.

Genesis 1:1 - In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Isaiah 45:18 - For thus says the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.

Jeremiah 32:17 - Ah Lord GOD! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for thee.

Jeremiah 51:16 - When he utters his voice, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens; and he causes the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth: he makes lightnings with rain, and brings forth the wind out of his treasures. 

nature

The British countryside is threatened by people and interests who really do not care for it - Simon Jenkins, Chair, National Trust (January 2013)

What we call 'economic growth' is in fact a growth in waste and a decline in the health of natural habitat - Satish Kumar, ecological campaigner (2008)

The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts - Aldo Leopold

To care for the natural world is the most effective insurance policy we can have - Phil Harding (2011)

By failing to recognise the reality of our absolute reliance on ecosystem services, many do not realise that it is in our self-interest to preserve them - Executive Summary 'Valuing our life support systems', Natural Capital Initiative (2009)

Whatever we do to nature, we do to ourselves - Kurt Heidinger

We are very fond of blaming the poor for destroying the environment. But often it is the powerful, including governments, that are responsible - Wangari Maathai (1940 - 2011), environmental activist, first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004

To halt the decline of an ecosystem, it is necessary to think like an ecosystem - Douglas Wheeler

...we depend on the gifts of nature, but these gifts must be received with gratitude and not exploited or abused - Satish Kumar (ecological campaigner, writing in National Trust Magazine, Spring 2010)

...the future of mankind can be assured only if we rediscover ways in which to live as a part of nature, not apart from her - HRH The Prince of Wales addressing UN climate conference COP15, Copenhagen (December 2009)

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment - Margaret Mead

Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle - Pope John Paul II

Wildlife of the world is disappearing... simply because of a general and widespread ignorance and neglect - HRH Prince Philip

If it's unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature - Mollie Beattie, Director, US Fish and Wildlife Service 1993-1996


Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites - William Ruckelshaus

Modern man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side - E F Schumacher

Just as our banking sector is struggling with its debts - and paradoxically also facing calls for a return to so-called "old-fashioned," traditional banking - so Nature's life-support systems are failing to cope with the debts we have built up there too. So, if we don't face up to this, then Nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust - HRH The Prince of Wales, The Richard Dimbleby Lecture "Facing the Future" (8 July 2009)

I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defence of our resources is just as important as defence abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend? - Robert Redford

The conservation of nature, the proper care for the human environment and a general concern for the long-term future of the whole of our planet are absolutely vital if future generations are to have a chance to enjoy their existence on this earth - HRH Prince Philip

At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realise I am fighting for humanity - Chico Mendes, Rubber tappers' leader

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap - Kurt Vonnegut Jnr

...our culture's frenzied and mindless assault on the last shreds of nature may not be the wisest course... We're melting the ice caps, ripping up the rainforest, and vacuuming the oceans of everything that wriggles - George Meyer, writer for The Simpsons (BBC Green Room, 3 August 2006)

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal - Edward Wilson

Forests precede civilizations, deserts follow - unattributable



As custodians of the planet it is our responsibility to deal with all species with kindness, love and compassion - Richard Gere

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere - Richard Bach

We define our landscapes as much as they define us - unattributable

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen - Henry David Thoreau, American writer (1817-1862)

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Man is a complex being; he makes the deserts bloom and lakes die - Gil Stern

Activities that destroy ecosystems always destroy jobs - unattributable

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment - Ansel Adams, US photographer and environmentalist (1902 - 1984)

The preservation of biodiversity is not just a job for governments. International and non-governmental organisations, the private sector and each and every individual have a role to play in changing entrenched outlooks and ending destructive patterns of behaviour - Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General on the 2003 International Day of Biological Diversity

Our environment is like a patchwork quilt. Each "patch" is dependent on those around it. If one part unravels, it affects the rest - Hemeon

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative - H G Wells



If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse - Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Till now man has been up against nature, from now on he will be up against his own nature - Dennis Gabor

The frog does not drink up the pond in which it lives - Indian proverb

We all live downstream - David Suzuki

Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find - Quoted in Time magazine

Modern technology owes ecology an apology - Alan M Eddison

The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences - Frank Herbert

Once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price - Ansel Adams, US photographer and environmentalist (1902 - 1984)

The environment is not as 'cheap as chips', it's priceless and we all have a part to play in protecting it - David Dickinson (TV celebrity)

Only when the last tree is cut, only when the last river is polluted, only when the last fish is caught, will they realise that you can't eat money - Native American proverb

Let us a little permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we - Michel de Montaigne

But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving - Douglas Adams (author)

Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially - E B White

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value - Theodore Roosevelt (US President 1901-1909)

Organic agriculture is more about fairness and respect than it is about parts-per-billion of pesticide residues - Jim Hightower, organic campaigner (USA)

If we do not permit the Earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either - Joseph Woodkrutch

In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we have been taught - Baba Dioum

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase it's usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very properity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed - Theodore Roosevelt

If you mess with something long enough, it will break - Schmidt's Law

Beauty dies where litter lies - unattributable

And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: "Look at this Godawful mess!" - Art Buchwald

When you defile the pleasant streams,
And the wild bird's abiding place,
You massacre a million dreams,
And cast your spittle in God's face
- John Drinkwater

Nature is what wins in the end - Abby Adams (1902-1984)




Miscellaneous

The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river - Ross Perot

Our relationship with Nature... best way of forging this relationship... be a pilgrim and not a tourist on Planet Earth - Satish Kumar, ecological campaigner (2008)

The surrounding environment is the best erudite master to teach us the fundamental laws of nature and the basics of living life - Anuj Somany

Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street - William Blake

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them - Mark Twain

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe - Carl Sagan

Don't count the seeds in an apple, count the apples in a seed! - Aine Belton

Your descendants shall gather your fruits - Virgil

I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God - Alan Hovhaness

Men argue; nature acts - Voltaire

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished - Lao Tzu

It seems to me that we all look at nature too much, and live with her too little - Oscar Wilde

Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way - Vandana Shiva

Those who love and free nature are never alone - Rachel Carson

When you realise how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky - Buddha

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled - Richard Feynman

Anywhere is paradise; it's up to you - unattributable

Nature: a place where birds fly around uncooked - Oscar Wilde

There is however, a true music of nature; the song of the birds, the whisper of leaves, the ripple of waters upon a sandy shore, the wail of wind or sea - Lubbock

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song - Lou Holz

Everybody loves birdsong. It's a human need... the sound of birds gives a deep, if sometimes almost unnoticed, pleasure - Simon Barnes, Wild Notebook, The Times (31.12.2011)

Acquiring the trick of listening to birds will teach you how better to enjoy life and how better to endure it - Simon Barnes, Wild Notebook, The Times (31.12.2011)

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

The Earth laughs in flowers - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower - Albert Camus

If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment - O'Keefe

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change - Buddha

Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul - Prophet Muhammad

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers - Claude Monet

There are always flowers for those who want to see them - Henri Matisse

Take the time to smell a rose - unattributable

Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine for the soul - Luther Burbank

Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out-values all the utilities of the world - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

A rose must remain with the sun and the rain or its lovely promise won't come true - Ray Evans

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

If you are thinking one year ahead, sow seed. If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree. If you are thinking 100 years ahead, educate the people - Chinese proverb

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything - William Shakespeare

A light wind swept over the corn, and all nature laughed in the sunshine - Anne Bronte

Do not cut down the tree that gives you shade - Arabian proverb

The tree bestows its shade on all, even the woodcutter - Indian proverb

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars - Walt Whitman

The Amazon is a canary in a coal mine for the Earth - Dan Nepstadt, Ecologist (October 2005)

Every object is beautiful in motion; a ship under sail, trees gently agitated with the wind, and a fine woman dancing, are three instances in point - Abigail Adams (1744-1818) 2nd First Lady of the USA

We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem - William McDonough, architect

No man manages his affairs as well as a tree does - George Bernard Shaw

I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree - (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of autumn - John Muir

I see trees of green, red roses too. I see them bloom for me and you. And I think to myself what a wonderful world. I see skies of blue and clouds of white. The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night. And I think to myself what a wonderful world - What a Wonderful World, Louis Armstrong (1901-1970)

Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes - every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man - Orison Swett Marten

We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea - Paul Tillich

How oft a summer shower has started me; to seek the shelter of a hollow tree - "The Hollow Tree" by John Clare

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug - Helen Keller

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free - Charles Dickens

Animals are such agreeable friends; they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms - George Eliot

I wandered lonely as a cloud, that floats on high o'er vales and hills. When all at once I saw a crowd, a host, of golden daffodil; beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze - William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now - Dambisa Moyo, Zambian economist

Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven't done a thing. You are just talking - Wangari Maathai (1940 - 2011), environmental activist, first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004

He that plants trees loves others besides himself - English proverb

Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind the stronger the trees - John Willard Marriott

The world's forests are a shared stolen treasure that we must put back for our children's future - Archbishop Desmond Tutu

We can only truly be civilised people when we have regular and meaningful contact with the wild world - Simon Barnes, Wild Notebook, The Times (31.12.2011)

As each tree falls so does the earth's ability to heal itself and to adapt to the effects of our changing climate - Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs addressing Copenhagen COP15 UN conference (13 December 2009)

The best friend of earth and of man is the tree. When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources on the earth - Frank Lloyd Wright

Trees are your best antiques - Alexander Smith

Trees give peace to the souls of men - Nora Waln (1895-1964)

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful - Alice Walker

Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence - Hal Borland

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, reformer and teacher (1483 - 1546)

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way - Bernoulli

Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am two with nature - Woody Allen

The value of nature: On many levels, physical, mental and spiritual, our life is dependent on the natural environment. That is to say, our existence and well-being require the maintenance of that which has its being irrespective of ourselves and our efforts - Keith Innes

In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences - R Ingersoll

If we care about the countyside we must eat the view. Most wonderful landscapes are the product of many years of farming. By buying the products of that farming we can all do our part to sustain our beautiful scenery - Richard Wakeford, Chief Executive, Countryside Agency (2002)

People everywhere depend upon biodiversity for their livelihoods, their quality of life, and to provide basic ecological services on which all life depends - The Business and Biodiversity Resource Centre (www.businessandbiodiversity.org)

The spirit of a country, if it is to be true to itself, needs continually to draw great breaths of inspiration from the simple realities of the country; from the smell of its soil, the pattern of its fields, the beauty of its scenery and from the men and women who dwell and toil in the rural areas - Sir George Stapledon in 'Make Fruitful the Land'

A fertile living soil means healthy crops, animals and human beings - unattributable

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard - Standing Bear

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature - Anne Frank

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair - Kahlil Gibran

Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather - John Ruskin

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night - Steve Martin

Don't knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn't start a conversation if it didn't change once in a while - Kin Hubbard

If people sat outside at night and looked at the stars each night I bet they would live a lot differently - Bill Watterson, cartoonist

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

The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged by the hand of man - unattributable

Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift - Albert Einstein

This curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient, more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used - Henry David Thoreau, American writer (1817-1862)

If we once, and for so long, lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again - John Zerzan

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost - Gilbert Keith Chesterton

If you are missing out on the natural joy and wisdom of life, it is because you have been taught to ignore it....Reconnecting with nature consists of bringing into your consciousness a sensory way of thinking and relating with which you are born - Michael J. Cohen

Nature never says one thing and wisdom another - Decimus Junius Juvenalis

In the United Kingdom no one lives more than 75 miles from the sea. For us, as an island nation, the sea has an all-embracing presence. Spiritually and physically we are intimately connected with our shores. The sea has immense power, which we ignore at our peril - National Trust 'Shifting Shores - Living with a changing coastline' (2005)

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore;
There is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar;
I love not man the less, but nature more - George Gordon Byron, 1788-1824

April hath put a spirit of youth in everything - William Shakespeare

The earth has music for those who listen - William Shakespeare

Come forth into the light of things. Let nature be your teacher - William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

The poetry of the earth is never dead - John Keats

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order - John Burroughs

When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves - David Orr

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world - John Muir

The beauty of mother nature is her ability to make complex things appear simple - Loius E Samuels, M.D.

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts - Rachel Carson