Naturalists From The United States

"While expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness."

"It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bond we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder. We get good training along the way. We learn to say "Have a great time, sweetie" while we are longing to pull them back to safety. And against all the evolutionary imperatives of protecting our gene pool, we give them car keys. And freedom. It's our job. And I wanted to be a good mother."

"We set ourselves up as arbiters of what is good when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests, by what we want."

"' is a safe place, a nursery for fish and insects, a shelter from predators, a safety net for the small beings of the pond. Hydrodictyon— Latin for "the water net." What a curious thing. A fishnet catches fish, a bug net catches bugs. But a water net catches nothing, save what cannot be held. Mothering is like that, a net of living threads to lovingly encircle what it cannot possibly hold, what will eventually move through it."

"Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in."

"Transformation is not accomplished by tentative wading at the edge."

"I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around."

"I like the ecological idea of aging as progressive enrichment, rather than progressive loss."

"Being a good mother means teaching your children to care for the world."

"All moms have treasured ways to spend the few precious hours they have to themselves, curling up with a book or sewing, but I mostly went to the water, the birds and the wind and the quiet were what I needed."

"A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other."

"We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species. But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be."

"The maples carried the people through, provided food just when they needed it most."

"There are some aches witch hazel can't assuage; for those, we need each other."

"The sphere of a wise woman is beyond herself, beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the earth."

"I suppose it might be argued that, for the amateur watcher seeking a meaningful connection with birds, this attention to remote detail is just another form of scientific reductionism, that harried foe of poetry and wonder. In my experience, it is so much the opposite. The tinier the details I come to comprehend, the more bewildered I become, the richer, it seems, the more inspiring of awe, is the biological life I manage to encounter. The minutiae offer a focus that bridges the aesthetic and scientific worlds."

"Cormorants are hated. In one popular anti-cormorant treatise, the bird is blamed for its very existence: “A war is being waged between the interests of sport fishermen and a predatory bird that has no local natural enemy. The bird’s sole purpose is to reproduce and eat fish.” Of course, obtaining food and reproducing are two primary goals of any species, including our own."

"In my experience, birds are as fine and appropriate a lens through which to assimilate life as anything else."

"Mayr became a mentor for many promising young men with an interest in birds. He urged them to pick a bird, to follow and study it, to learn the secrets of its breeding life, its winter habits, to take in small details that no one else knew because no one else had ever watched so closely. Mayr argued against a stream of ornithologists who hoped to make the science entirely academic, feeling that serious amateurs could make valuable contributions to the field of ornithology if they watched birds seriously and well."

"Owls are not like other birds. I suppose one could say this about any avian tribe, but owls are particularly unlike, with layered dimensions of dissimilarity."

"With the Renaissance came a period of new life for collectors. The churches of southern Europe became art galleries, and monarchs and noblemen and ecclesiastical dignitaries collected books, manuscripts, sculptures, pottery, and gems, forming the beginning of collections which have since grown into public museums. Some of these collections doubtless had their first beginnings in the midst of the dark ages, within the walls of feudal castles, or the larger monasteries, but their number was small, and they must have consisted chiefly of those objects so nearly akin to literature as especially to command the attention of bookish men."

"The exposition or exhibition and fair are primarily for the promotion of industry and commerce; the museum for the development of learning."

"It was my greatest good fortune to serve under Doctor George Brown Goode whose influence on the museums of America may be compared to that of Flower on the museums of England. Like Flower, he early recognized the educational possibilities of museums and the importance of making them interesting and attractive to the general public. One of his favorite maxims was to keep ever in mind the human interest in any exhibit, to show just where and how it touched man directly. And under his direction, the U. S. National Museum, and the various exhibitions in which it took part, exerted a great influence on the museums of the country and particularly on those that came into existence after 1880."

"Central America’s highest value as a natural phenomenon may be not in its diversity and adaptations, priceless as those are, but in its powerful demonstration of life’s sphericality. Life would have been fundamentally different if it had evolved on a limitless flat substrate instead of a limited, spherical one. It’s hard to imaging what it would have been like, but one possibility is that it never would have evolved beyond the first unicellular organisms. If they had been able to expand their populations ad infinitum, they might never have undergone the competitive pressures that led to natural selection and increasingly complex organization. Civilization has come to see the sphere’s limitations as an obstacle, but this is unimaginative, like being angry at the curved horizon because it hides objects more than a few dozen kilometers away."

"History doesn’t supersede evolution, it merely complicates it."

"Like all evolutionary stories, it is really two—of how the land bridge evolved, and of how people discovered it. Evolution occurs in geological time but is perceived in historical time."

"Flatness implied infinite extension, or at least a limitedness less inherent than that of the spherical, where every movement forward leads one step closer to the starting point. Perhaps human values have yet to assimilate the earth’s shape. Although every physical evidence suggests that endless forward movement, endless growth, is impossible on a sphere, civilization is trying to grow endlessly. Our economics and politics are based on endlessness, and even our ideas of organic evolution, which of all things should have transcended flat-earth thinking, have an essential two-dimensionality."

"After the fox, a creature that resembled a cross between a groundhog and a midget deer emerged to patrol in its turn. The creature was so strange that I had no idea what it was, and so found it nearly as unsatisfactory as the too-familiar fox. Exoticism must be identifiable to be appreciated."

"My ignorant journey had started a change in my thinking. I’d come south unconsciously regarding life as something to be adapted to desire. I disliked the usual way civilization reshapes nature by turning landscapes into suburbs or theme parks, yet my tropical daydream was also an attempt, psychological rather than technological, to make the landscape a desirable artifice. Central America’s roller coaster of diversity had showed me how unimaginative that attempt was."

"Central America aroused my curiosity after twenty years of an education that had seemed largely to dull it. I had been a mediocre student, partly because I was lazy, but also because my enthusiasms seldom followed the curriculum. Curiosity was encouraged in theory, but students were supposed to be curious about what the authorities wanted to teach. In Central America, there were no authorities, or none that I was supposed to consult. Trees had no labels or park rangers to identify them, and I suddenly wanted to know what they were."

"Many university departments—especially the traditional resource disciplines such as fisheries, wildlife, range management, and forestry—are closely tied to industry or hook‐and‐bullet recreation and treat conservation biology with anxiety or disdain."

"... We cannot get big grants to do field work anymore. ... Will the next generation of conservation biologists be nothing but a bunch of computer nerds with no firsthand knowledge of natural history? ... The naturalists are dying off and have few heirs."

"Among the common changes in forests over the past two centuries are loss of old forests, simplification of forest structure, decreasing size of forest patches, increasing isolation of patches, disruption of natural fire regimes, and increased road building, all of which have had negative effects on native biodiversity."

"During his lifetime, Carr, the "Turtle Man," was recognized as the foremost authority on turtles. He helped dispel the myths and folklore about turtles. His extensive studies of the migrations and habits of turtles enabled him to locate the optimal areas for turtles to live and breed. His consistent efforts for the conservation of turtles have helped to increase their population throughout the world."

"Sea turtles of all kinds are peculiarly prone to eat plastic scraps and other buoyant debris and to tangle themselved in lines and netting discarded by fishermen, and records of such mishaps have increased markedly in recent years."

"Science, as traditionally defined, is fundamental to conservation biology but does no good if isolated from "softer" issues such as ethics, sociology, and political strategy. Indeed, there is nothing more dangerous than science in an ethical vacuum."

"No thoughtful persons could stand beneath one of these immense trees, gaze up into its canopy, and help but think that here is a remarkable organism—so much more than all the board-feet of lumber that men might cleave from it."

"The freshwater fish fauna of Florida is one of the most interesting in the United States. It is a fauna developed in a region of recent geologic origin, low topographic relief, poor drainage, and unusual geographic configuration, and consequently exhibits certain very peculiar features. Some of the characteristic continental groups apparently have not had time to establish themselves in the peninsula since its elevation above the sea, while others have doubtless failed to find suitable conditions in its low and swamp-bordered water courses."

"Nature no longer entertains us when conserving it becomes inconvenient."

"Only a little while ago the oceans seemed unassailable—too big and stable to be hurt by man, too teeming with life to let him ever go hungry. But now we know better. Suddenly, even the myriad creatures of the sea are suffering from human intemperance. The offal of cities circles the world in global currents; beaches are strewn with the cast-off artifacts of men two thousand miles away."

"The main lesson that emerges from this volume is that sea level rise, combined with human population growth, urban development in coastal areas, and landscape fragmentation, poses an enormous threat to human and natural well-being in Florida. How Floridians respond to sea level rise will offer lessons, for better or worse, for other low-lying regions worldwide."

"Endless fascination with nature—nothing more and nothing less—is the key to enlisting people in the fight to save biodiversity."

"A few human generations ago, grasslands were abundant across much of the South; today there are rare. Driving through the region today, one mostly sees agricultural fields, pine plantations, dense and mostly young hardwood forests and swamps, and, increasingly, urban sprawl."

"I have looked attentively at chickens raised in this battery] fashion, and to me they seem to be unhappy and in poor health. Their combs are dull and lifeless except for glaring and unnatural patches of color that appear occasionally … The battery chickens I have observed seem to lose their minds about the time they would normally be weaned by their mothers and off in the weeds chasing grasshoppers on their own account. Yes, literally, actually, the battery becomes a gallinaceous madhouse. The eyes of these chickens through the bars gleam like those of maniacs. Let your hand get within reach and it receives a dozen vicious peeks—not the love peck or the tentative peek of idle curiosity bestowed by the normal chicken, but a peck that means business, a peck for flesh and blood, for which in their madness they are thirsting."

"I believe that animals have rights which, although different from our own, are just as inalienable. I believe animals have the right not to have pain, fear or physical deprivation inflicted upon them by us. Even if they are on the way to the slaughterhouse, animals have the right to food and water and shelter if it is needed. They have the right not to be brutalized in any way as food resources, for entertainment or any other purpose. … Finding a substitute for animals in research has only recently become an imperative in the scientific community. … One day animals will not be used in the laboratory. How soon that day comes depends on how soon people stop screaming and make the search for alternatives a major research imperative. As long as conferences on the subject sound like feeding time in the monkey house, monkeys along with millions of other animals are going to stay right where they are now — in the laboratory."

"Peter Matthiessen’s writing — fiction and nonfiction — does not provide approximations. What it does do with inimitable skill is put a reader at the live heart of life — a powerful, rich sense of immediacy, of being in that moment. … He is a man of tough-minded opinion, deeply earned and forthrightly rendered, with passion and quick humor ringed with what one writer calls a "useful melancholy." … There is, to my mind, no writing life more vital and of greater distinction in the second half of our century. Matthiessen’s prodigious and varied works led William Styron to call him "an original and powerful artist . . . who has produced as distinguished a body of work as any writer of our time . . . He has immeasurably enlarged our consciousness.""

""Warbler Woods" (For Peter Matthiessen) Never too proud to tip his head back./To gaze, look beyond.../He knew the names of every warbler,/stitched inside his skin,/the seven eagles, graceful cranes, he followed them/to tucked-away forests and creeks, could see/a slightest flicker of movement,/a nesting memory, how the world was once,/would never be again./He could stand under skies for hours,/never weary of their habits, never tire."

"I am a writer. A fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on behalf of social and environmental causes or journals about expeditions to wild places. I have written more books of nonfiction because my fiction is an exploratory process — not laborious, merely long and slow and getting slower."

"When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions — such as merit, such as past, present, and future — our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment. We identify, label, and interpret our surroundings as abstract concepts, quite separate from another concept, which is our own separate identity and ego."

"Many great writers inspired me, of course, but inspiration is not the same as a direct influence. I was often stirred by the beauty of great prose, the passion and startling intensity of hard-won truths, which leapt from that creative fire. … For the writer, therefore the reader, fresh truth is exhilarating, even painful truth, as in Kafka or Céline. Isn’t that what good writing finally arrives at? The insights and epigrams of Alexander Pope weren’t clichés when he wrote them, any more than those resounding lines in Shakespeare. They only became dog-eared from overuse."