The Way of Natural History Quotes

“Conservation biologists John Terborgh and Jim Estes consider loss of top predators from ecosystems worldwide due to persecution by humans a crisis as significant as climate change. They suggest that as with climate change, the problem of loss of biodiversity caused by loss of keystones will only worsen until we take measures to correct it. While restoring keystones will not solve all our problems, it will create more resilient systems, help restore and maintain biodiversity, and heal some of the damage we have done to this Earth.”
― Thomas Lowe Fleischner, The Way of Natural History

“Well-honed attention—as evidenced in trackers, mindfulness practitioners, athletes, hunters, artists, writers, ornithologists, and more—is something quite different. It can be focused narrowly or distributed across the entire visual field at will. Its focus can be internal (on the contents of mind) or external, and it can be sustained for long periods. It is penetrating, quick, and efficient, picking up signals that are altogether unseen by the untrained eye.”
― Thomas Lowe Fleischner, The Way of Natural History

“I sat on the bank, holding the stone, and tried to list to myself the motions that were at that moment acting upon it: the Earth’s 700-miles-per-hour spin around its axis, its 67,000-miles-per-hour orbit about the sun, its slow precessional straightening tilt within inertial space, and, containing all of that, the galaxy’s own inestimable movement outward in the deep night of space.”
― Thomas Lowe Fleischner, The Way of Natural History