Steve

“People who live on continents get into the habit of regarding the ocean as journey's end, the full stop at the end of the trek. For people who live on islands, the sea is always the beginning. It's the ferry to the mainland, the escape route from the boredom and narrowness of home.”
― Jonathan Raban, Coasting: A Private Voyage

“How is it that people look at the same city and see such very different places? The answer lies in history, or, more accurately, in how people have chosen to remember the past. The habit of regarding culture and nature as binary categories has shaped how we view cities and their dynamic environments. The result is a kind of intellectual myopia in which 'history is experienced as nostalgia and nature as regret--as a horizon fast disappearing behind us.”
― Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle

“I loved the sense of being so close to the city, yet so far out on this magnificently eventful sea, with its wild creatures and mazy channels. I thought, if I lived in Seattle, I’d keep a boat of my own, and sail it to where the tide ran at sixteen knots at springs, and where there were whirlpools ten feet deep. I’d live on a sane frontier between nature and civilization, with one foot in the water, the other in a metropolis of restaurants and bookstores. I’d read and write in the mornings, and run away to sea in the afternoons.”
― Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings

“Deep ecology does not see the world as a collection of isolated objects but rather as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. It recognizes the intrinsic value of all living beings and views humans—in the celebrated words attributed to Chief Seattle—as just one particular strand in the web of life.”
― Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism