ChrisR

“Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as 'sentimental', 'impractical', or 'womanish', etc., by those whose fun, profit or convenience was at stake”
― Joan Gilbert

“Our very human to simplify and seek one answer may explain our ongoing difficulty in recognizing impending synergy and acting before systems collapse. We are prone to accept death by a thousand little cuts, in which one degraded aspect of our environment or health becomes familiar and accepted as normal--and then another.”
― Mark L. Winston, Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive

“The Lebanese flag has a cedar tree on it because much of what is now desert was thickly forested before the harbingers of civilization--i.e., woodcutters, farmers, and goats--saw to it that large stands of cedar will never grace the Holy Land again. The stark and sere limestone hills that we think of as typical Greek and Italian landscape were once all but invisible beneath a layer of long-gone topsoil held in place by forests of cedar and oak.”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“Just think what this land would raise with plenty of water! Why, it will be a frigging garden!”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden