The Ground Beneath Us Quotes

“And you could pick up the egg. And the little duckling inside had maybe just busted a very small hole in the shell, and you could whistle, just a peep-peep-peep at the egg, and the little duckling inside would whistle back at you. That was a big moment for me. "

--- Ray Norgaard, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“To feel all the beauty; not understand it, feel it. To see a sunset, or in the early morning when you see all the birds, this is something spiritual.”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“fewer berries to pick in the summer, fewer animals to hunt in the fall and winter, less ice and snow—green grass in January, bees in February, pussy willow blooming three months early. “There’s so much not normal stuff going on.”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“I follow the ancient sound of cranes returning at dusk, the great flights descending, coming in after the day of gathering energy from the cornfields, this wild, ancient ritual repeated here before me in a world gone so crazy and broken and out of control. All these birds that have moved across the continent longer than any other, that predate anything we have done, are here still alive.”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“At twenty years or more Sand-hill Cranes are long-lived birds, and they will sometimes fly five hundred miles each day. For me, their migrations mean something similar to seeing the stars. They are evidence of something that includes us, but is bigger than us, of a force that goes on around us and without us.”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“If we had a medication that did this—a medication that prolonged life, that addressed very different unconnected causes of disease, that did it at no cost and with no side effects—that would be the best medication of the decade. But we don’t have a medication like that except for this ‘vitamin N’—nature.”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are

“the brain of the fly… resembles a grain of sugar”; “every species is a magic well”

--- E.O. Wilson, Harvard biologist”
― Paul Bogard, The Ground Beneath Us: From the Oldest Cities to the Last Wilderness, What Dirt Tells Us About Who We Are