Michael > Michael's Quotes

“Over time, jealousy becomes an element as indispensable as paint in the life of the master artist.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

“If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Scientific discoveries, like most surprises, come by luck, and luck comes by keeping moving and having a keen nose to detect anomalies.”
― Bernd Heinrich, Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival

“Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Old-growth cultures, like old-growth forests, have not been exterminated. The land holds their memory and the possibility of regeneration. They are not only a matter of ethnicity or history, but of relationships born out of reciprocity between land and people.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Weep! Weep!” calls a toad from the water’s edge. And I do. If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Don’t be one way, Wishing for another, Only to arrive at the new way, Wishing for the first.”
― Scott Stillman, Wilderness, The Gateway To The Soul: Spiritual Enlightenment Through Wilderness

“One emerging view of Homo sapiens among evolutionary biologists is that he has built a trap for himself by clinging to certain orthodoxies in a time of environmental emergency. A belief in cultural progress, for example, or in the propriety of a social animal’s quest for individual material wealth is what has led people into the trap, or so goes the thinking. To cause the trap to implode, to disintegrate, humanity has to learn to navigate using a reckoning fundamentally different from the one it’s long placed its faith in. A promising first step to take in dealing with this trap might be to bring together wisdom keepers from traditions around the world whose philosophies for survival developed around the same uncertainty of a future that Darwin suggested lies embedded in everything biological. Such wisdom keepers would be people who are able to function well in the upheaval of any century. Their faith does not lie solely with pursuing technological innovation as an approach to solving humanity’s most pressing problems. Their solutions lie with a profound change in what humans most value.”
― Barry Lopez, Horizon

“Evolution, if it is nothing else, is endless modification, change without reason or end. Notions of preserving racial purity in the twenty-first century, or of maintaining biologically static environments, in which all new arrivals are classified as “invasive” or “foreign” and are to be expunged, or are not permitted entry to start with, are untenable. The obvious ethical issues aside, these arguments deny the flow of time. Landscapes are figuratively, not actually, timeless. And ours is an age of unprecedented cultural exchange, of emigration and immigration. Reactionary resentment around issues of race and culture has no future but warfare.”
― Barry Lopez, Horizon

“I return to the wilderness to remember what I have forgotten, that the world can be wholesome and beautiful, that the harmony and integrity of ecosystems at peace is a mirror to what we have lost.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

“Freedom is a word like “love” or “health” that teeters on the edge of cliché until you don’t have one or the other and you wish like hell that you did.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

“The time has come for acts of reverence and restraint on behalf of the Earth. We have arrived at the Hour of Land.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

“There is something ominous about a swift river, and something thrilling about a river of any kind. The nearest upstream bend is a gate out of mystery, the nearest downstream bend a door to further mystery.”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell & the Second Opening of the West

“And at some immeasurably remote time beyond human caring the whole uneasy region might sink again beneath the sea and begin the cycle all over again by the slow deposition of new marls, shales, limestones, sandstones, deltaic conglomerates, perhaps with a fossil poet pressed and silicified between the leaves of rock. It”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell & the Second Opening of the West

“Were there land-hogs trying to corral grazing empires in PoweII’s time, and not above barefaced trespass on the public domain? They are still there, only now they are trying to bite out of national parks and national forests chunks of grazing land, oil land, timberland, that they covet. The conservation forces swamped such a foray in 1947;15 they will have others to fight, and they may never be able to restore the full effectiveness of the Grazing Service which Senator McCarran — a Senator Stewart come again, and from the same state — all but ruined by the profoundly Stewart-ian tactics of investigating and then cutting the budget.16”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell & the Second Opening of the West

“By now, however, we should have learned that treating the planet as if it were a simple, predictable, passive object in a controlled laboratory experiment is scientifically inexcusable. Yet the same old time-blind hubris is allowing the seductive idea of climate engineering, sometimes called geoengineering, to gain traction in certain academic and political circles.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Fathoming deep time is arguably geology’s single greatest contribution to humanity. Just as the microscope and telescope extended our vision into spatial realms once too minuscule or too immense for us to see, geology provides a lens through which we can witness time in a way that transcends the limits of our human experiences.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“It is also not the “end of nature” but, instead, the end of the illusion that we are outside nature. Dazzled by our own creations, we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted. As a species, we are much less flexible than we would like to believe, vulnerable to economic loss and prone to social unrest when nature—in the guise of Katrina, Sandy, or Harvey, among others—diverges just a little from what we expect.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“we should all carry two slips of paper in our pockets: one that says “I am ashes and dust,” and one that reads “The world was made for me.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“We think velocity is new, change is new, and this vast tumult and wave of fear is new. And we are wrong. There has never been firm ground for our lives and our only balm has been a forgetfulness of the changes we have endured.”
― Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future

“Along with agriculture, it appears that the advent of these more profound and more permanent homes spawned a more dogmatic sense of ceremonial life, as if the increase in introspection was commensurate with the depth of the pit houses—the sum effect being more time spent underground, devoid of sensory stimulus. In other words, a spiritual life began to be sought at the expense of a sensual one.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“To truly inhabit a place is to learn to dwell with the differences that threaten to divide it. Otherwise, one beckons monotony.”
― Amy Irvine, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land

“When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“An ellipse of pale rose sand lines the inside of a river bend of such beauty, you could set yourself on fire with the rapture of that curve. In it lies a kind of music in stone that might cure all emptiness.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“That wild animals have largely moved out of our view is of small note to many of us. We think, abstractly, that they live out there somewhere, browsing or flying or killing or doing whatever it is they do, and we think that we are keeping them among us by the sheer force of our desire, even as we consume, insatiably, the places where they live.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“When the world began, it was very small. Songs blew the earth up to its present size. Songs turn frustration into power, anxiety into comfort. Like a blanket, they form a zone of protection around the singer. Sing on the way home alone at night in a fearful place and the song will move out into the space around you. Is this not prayer, sounds that come from our breath, lifting the spirit as they meet the air?”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Under the aegis of wildlife management, the oxymoron that is now a fact of life for most North American creatures, spins unbounded tinkering, with further tinkering made necessary by past tinkering, effects of causes, effects of effects—a “cascade of consequences” precipitated by human intervention, well intended though it may be.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Shall we be honest about this? The mind needs wild animals. The body needs the trek that takes it looking for them.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

“Close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware not only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. “Without mystery life shrinks,” wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. “The completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.”
― Ellen Meloy, Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild