Readings in Wood Quotes

“Take a picture of yourself standing on your lawn, and you have a Wanted Dead or Alive poster for the most invasive plant and animal in North America—garden grass and Homo sapiens. No kudzu-choked hillside, no river cursed with purple plantain, no spotted knotweed waste compares to the green deserts of our yards in terms of water waste, herbicide and fertilizer, gasoline and lawn mower. And no zebra mussel, nutria, mustang, or gypsy moth has, like Homo sapiens, driven to extinction a single species or threatened to erase entire ecosystems, such as our prairies and our longleaf stands. The despised chestnut blight decimated but a single species, after all. We humans have killed off no one knows how many.”
― John Leland, Readings in Wood: What the Forest Taught Me