Kirk

“There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish Civil War or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer time scale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses

“Most big freshwater fish, in most parts of the world, have all but disappeared from most places where they used to live. As with arapaima, the main reason is over-harvesting, but there are other factors too. Dams block the migration routes of many fish, so they disappear from the water above the dam — or even altogether, if breeding grounds are cut off. Draining of floodplains, cutting off backwaters, competition from invasive species and pollution also play a part. And sometimes it's just willful slaughter, as was the case with the North American alligator gar in the early 1900s, thanks to the incorrect assumption that killing these predators would boost populations of ‘game’ fish.”
― Jeremy Wade, How to Think Like a Fish: And Other Lessons from a Lifetime in Angling

“In Maie get a weede hooke, a crotch and a glove,
And weed out such weedes as the corne doth not love.
Slack never thy weeding, for dearth nor for cheape,
The corne shall reward it er ever ye reape.

[Thomas Tusser, ‘Five hundred points of husbandry: directing what corn, grass, is proper to be sown: what trees to be planted: how land is to be improved: with with whatever is fit to be done for the benefit of the farmer in every month of the year’ (1557).]”
― Helen Nearing, Wise Words for the Good Life

“He asked that roses be planted on his grave. When I checked, a few years ago, a scrappy red rose was blooming there.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses