Botanists From The United States

"To be heard, you must speak the language of the one you want to listen."

"To me, an experiment is a kind of conversation with plants: I have a question for them, but since we don’t speak the same language, I can’t ask them directly and they won’t answer verbally. But plants can be eloquent in their physical responses and behaviors. Plants answer questions by the way they live, by their responses to change; you just need to learn how to ask."

"Experiments are not about discovery but about listening and translating the knowledge of other beings."

"A theory, to scientists, means something rather different from its popular use, which suggests something speculative or untested. A scientific theory is a cohesive body of knowledge, an explanation that is consistent among a range of cases and can allow you to predict what might happen in unknown situations."

"Getting scientists to consider the validity of indigenous knowledge is like swimming upstream in cold, cold water. They’ve been so conditioned to be skeptical of even the hardest of hard data that bending their minds toward theories that are verified without the expected graphs or equations is tough. Couple that with the unblinking assumption that science has cornered the market on truth and there’s not much room for discussion."

"We are all the product of our worldviews—even scientists who claim pure objectivity."

"Science and traditional knowledge may ask different questions and speak different languages, but they may converge when both truly listen to the plants."

"Sustainable harvesting can be the way we treat a plant with respect, by respectfully receiving its gift."

"If we allow traditions to die, relationships to fade, the land will suffer."

"Through reciprocity the gift is replenished. All of our flourishing is mutual."

"Being a citizen does mean sharing in the support of your community."

"Most people are indifferent, unless their self-interest is at stake. Then there are the chronic complainers. [...] Fortunately, there are those in every organization, few but invaluable, who know their responsibilities and seem to thrive on meeting them. They get things done. These are the ones we all rely upon, the people who take care of the rest of us, quiet leaders."

"If citizenship is a matter of shared beliefs, then I believe in the democracy of species. If citizenship means an oath of loyalty to a leader, then I choose the leader of the trees. If good citizens agree to uphold the laws of the nation, then I choose natural law, the law of reciprocity, of regeneration, of mutual flourishing."

"If you ask permission, you have to listen to the answer."

"The need to resolve the inescapable tension between honoring life around us and taking it in order to live is part of being human."

"We are told to take only that which is given."

"Know the ways of the ones who take care of you, so that you may take care of them. Introduce yourself. Be accountable as the one who comes asking for life. Ask permission before taking. Abide by the answer. Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need. Take only that which is given. Never take more than half. Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Use it respectfully. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks for what you have been given. Give a gift, in reciprocity for what you have taken. Sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever."

"The taking of another life to support your own is far more significant when you recognize the beings who are harvested as persons, nonhuman persons vested with awareness, intelligence, spirit—and who have families waiting for them at home. Killing a who demands something different than killing an it. When you regard those nonhuman persons as kinfolk, another set of harvesting regulations extends beyond bag limits and legal seasons."

"Imagination is one of our most powerful tools. What we imagine, we can become."

"I’ve heard it said that sometimes, in return for the gifts of the earth, gratitude is enough. It is our uniquely human gift to express thanks, because we have the awareness and the collective memory to remember that the world could well be otherwise, less generous than it is. But I think we are called to go beyond cultures of gratitude, to once again become cultures of reciprocity."

"Reciprocity helps resolve the moral tension of taking a life by giving in return something of value that sustains the ones who sustain us. One of our responsibilities as human people is to find ways to enter into reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We can do it through gratitude, through ceremony, through land stewardship, science, art, and in everyday acts of practical reverence."

"The teachings tell us that a harvest is made honorable by what you give in return for what you take."

"A harvest is made honorable when it sustains the giver as well as the taker."

"What's good for the land is also good for the people."

"We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don't have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth's beings."

"I don't have much patience with food proselytizers who refuse all but organic, free-range, fair-trade gerbil milk. We each do what we can."

"Wild things should not be for sale."

"We have constructed an artifice, a Potemkin village of an ecosystem where we perpetrate the illusion that the things we consume have just fallen off the back of Santa's sleigh, not been ripped from the earth. The illusion enables us to imagine that the only choices we have are between brands."

"It is said that the Creator gathered together the four sacred elements and breathed life into them to give form to Original Man before setting him upon Turtle Island. The last of all beings to be created, First Man was given the name . The Creator called out the name to the four directions so that the others would know who was coming. Nanabozho, part man, part manido—a powerful spiritbeing—is the personification of life forces, the , and our great teacher of how to be human. In Nanabozho's form as Original Man and in our own, we humans are the newest arrivals on earth, the youngsters, just learning to find our way."

"Nanabozho did not know his parentage or his origins—only that he was set down into a fully peopled world of plants and animals, winds, and water. He was an immigrant too. Before he arrived, the world was all here, in balance and harmony, each one fulfilling their purpose in the Creation. He understood, as some did not, that this was not the "," but one that was ancient before he came."

"Time is not a river running inexorably to the sea, but the sea itself—its tides that appear and disappear, the fog that rises to become rain in a different river. All things that were will come again."

"Wabunong—the East—is the direction of knowledge. We send gratitude to the East for the chance to learn every day, to start anew."

"Names are the way we humans build relationship, not only with each other but with the living world."

"The South, zhawanong, the land of birth and growth. From the South comes the green that covers the world in spring, carried on the warm winds."

"To be indigenous is to protect life on earth."

"By honoring the knowledge in the land, and caring for its keepers, we start to become indigenous to place."

"To carry a gift is also to carry a responsibility."

"To become indigenous is to grow the circle of healing to include all of Creation."

"Harry's first publication (in 1951) was a short paper in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club entitled "Interesting weeds in New York City." It was during some of his collecting in the wilderness which is the Bronx that he was accosted by several policemen in a squad car, who demanded what he was doing with his odd vasculum over his shoulder. He explained he was a botanist and he was collecting plants. "You know all these weeds?", asked one the men. Upon being assured that he did, he was asked to join them in the car which drove some distance until they came to an open lot on which there was a flourishing crop. "What is it?" "Marihuana," was the reply. Whereupon one of the officers exploded, "Damn those kids, they told us they were tomatoes.""

"During the past three decades, plant anatomists have established a number of lines of phylogenetic specializations in the structures of the stele."

"Every time Botany and Zoology fuse, Botany ends up screwed to the wall.""

"Professor Ames' lineage was one of power and wealth."

"The orchid flora of the Philippine Archipelago is closely allied to that of Celebs, Java, and the Malay Peninsula. There are no endemic genera. The number of endemic species, on the contrary, is very large, at least six-sevenths of the known ones having been found nowhere else. It is safe to say that approximately ninety per cent of the orchid flora is endemic."

"He provides fascinating inside glimpses of Harvard biology in the age of the Olympians—East, Wheeler, Jeffrey, Sargent, Thaxter, Farlow, Weston, Bailey, and "Chinese" Wilson."

"In southern Florida the orchid flora is more or less confined to the peculiar hammock formations in the Everglades and in the pine woods. In these the species are found on the trees and on the ground, not infrequently around or withing the openings of lime-sinks. Each hammock is apt to have a distinctive flora, and when an orchid is common in one hammock, it may be rare in, or absent from, the next."

"His observations of animal behavior are numerous and detailed, and his interpretations merge into a coherent system of thought. The basis of the system is the belief that nature is an emanation of a benevolent God, and that since the animal creation is a part of nature, it therefore, too, is benevolent. Consequently he becomes a champion of the right of animals to be treated humanely."

"The subjectivity that developed through print culture required that persons give up private identities for public identity. ... The aim of representative men like Benjamin Franklin was to produce themselves as exemplary citizen-­subjects who existed primarily in print and in relation to others who also circulated in print. ... Bartram offers a good test case through which we can trace the emergence of a mode of agency that is not equivalent to subjectivity and that developed outside the metropolitan centers associated with print culture."

"When in my residence in Carolina and Florida, I have seen vast flights of the house swallow (hirundo pelasgia) and bank martin (hirundo riparia) passing onward northward toward Pennsylvania, where they breed in the spring, about the middle of March, and likewise in the autumn in September or October, and large flights on their return southward. And it is observable that they always avail themselves of the advantage of high and favouralbe winds, which likewise do all birds of passage."

"Should I say, that the river (in this place) from shore to shore, and perhaps near half a mile above and below me, appeared to be one solid bank of fish, of various kinds, pushing through this narrow pass of San Juan's into the little lake, on their return down the river, and that the alligators were in such incredible numbers, and so close from shore to shore, that it would have easy to have walked across on their heads, had the animals been harmless? What expressions can sufficiently declare the shocking scene that for some minutes continued, whilst this mighty army of fish were forcing the pass? During this attempt, thousands, I may say hundreds of thousands, of them were caught and swallowed by the devouring alligators. I have seen an alligator take up out of the water several great fish at a time, and just squeeze them betwixt his jaws, while the tails of the great trout flapped about his eyes and lips, ere he had swallowed them. The horrid noise of their closing jaws, their plunging amidst the broken banks of fish, and rising with their prey some feet upright above the water, the floods of water and blood rushing out of their mouths, and the clouds of vapor issuing from their wide nostrils, were truly frightful."

"December 2. MockingBird yet with us feeding on Smilax berries"