Grass, Sky, Song Quotes

“Any control we exert is illusory and brief. Eventually, the pine forest builds up enough fuel and fire is far bigger than it would've been if we had allowed natural fire; the levee gives out in a hurricane, the plutonium builds up in someone's bones, the bacteria outsmart the antibiotics, and the soil becomes exhausted. Even the science of conservation, in its efforts to "manage" land, operates under an assumption that people control nature.”
― Trevor Herriot, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds

“This is the moral compromise that since World War II has kept us going to the supermarket and restaurant instead of to the garden or the cold room. If it has brought us any security, it is the dubious sense of ease that goes with having been liberated from our responsibility for the quality of our engagement with the earth.”
― Trevor Herriot, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds

“Every spring I listen for them, wait to hear that cuckoo, cuckoo noise they make. I just really—I just loved those little birds, y’know. I’d be haulin’ manure and they’d be there hopping up and down … Their heads would turn to follow me and I swear they’d go all the way around. … Jeez, it was sad when they didn’t show up that year. I wonder why.” He looked up at us, hoping for some kind of explanation, and we just repeated what he already knew: it was the same all over.”
― Trevor Herriot, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds

“But now, with the cost-price squeeze farmers are under, they need to maximize and seed every inch of land so even the road allowances are under crop. And where there are roads on an allowance, the crop goes right to the edge of the road.”
― Trevor Herriot, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds

“Not long ago every farmer respected the sixty-six-foot-wide road allowance along the edge of his fields and left it to grass even if it was weedy”
― Trevor Herriot, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds