KENN KAUFMANN ON NATURAL HISTORY February 25, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Nature/Natural History.add a comment
When Birding magazine (Jan/Feb 2007) asked Kenn Kaufmann what he would do if he could have one wish to improve the world, Kaufmann replied: “My wish is that every person might learn to recognize fifty species of plants and animals native to his or her own region. That may not sound like much, but I’m convinced that it would profoundly change each person’s sense of values, each person’s sense of responsibility to the ecosystems that support all of our fellow creatures. That basic level of natural history could revolutionize our view of humanity’s place in the world. Maybe I’m just a dreamer, but I’m going to go on trying to communicate that basic appreciation of nature to everyone.” This answer could well be the mission statement of my own writing life….
ALDO LEOPOLD ON DARWIN February 24, 2007
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Also Leopold wrote in 1947: “It is now a century since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of the species. We now know what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise…. Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.”
ALDO LEOPOLD ON HISTORY February 24, 2007
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Also Leopold had an interesting view of history as not linear but successive. He said, “All history consists of successive excursions from a single starting point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.”
ALDO LEOPOLD ON SCIENCE February 24, 2007
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On the subject of science, Aldo Leopold wrote: “We doubt whether science can claim the credit for bigger and better tools, comforts, and securities without also claiming the credit for bigger and better erosions, denudations, and pollutions…. The definitions of science written by, let us say, the National Academy [of Sciences] deal almost exclusively with the creation and exercise of power. But what about the creation and exercise of wonder, or respect for workmanship in nature?” He went on to say, “If science cannot lead us to wisdom as well as power, it is surely no science at all…. We end, I think, at what might be called the standard paradox of the twentieth century: our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we do. They suffice to crack the atom, to command the tides. But they do not suffice for the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.”
OLD MINDS February 20, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Age.add a comment
A few years before he died in 1848, John Qunicy Adams said: “Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.” Sounds like what everyone is saying about preventing Alzheimer’s these days.
POETRY February 20, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Poetry.add a comment
W. H. Auden once said: “In poetry you have a form looking for a subject/and a subject looking for a form./When they come together successfully you have a poem.” This reminds me of what I used to tell my students about creating forms that would do justice to their contents ….
WHAT’S WRONG WITH US February 16, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Interesting, Nature/Natural History, Phenology, Time.add a comment
D. H. Lawrence wrote: “Blood knowledge…Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of Love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots.”
ROGER TORY PETERSON February 6, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Birds/Birding, Interesting.add a comment
Roger Tory Peterson said of his field guides: “My primary contribution — field recognition — could not have been made had I followed the traditional path as a biologist. Because of my art background I approached things visually rather than phylogenetically, hence the Peterson field guide system was born.”
POETRY February 6, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Poetry.add a comment
Robert Frost had a wonderful way of talking about the language of poetry. He referred to it as “the speaking tone of voice, somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination.”
WEALTH February 4, 2007
Posted by thenaturalist in Wealth.1 comment so far
Joseph Neubauer, CEO of Aramark, which makes most of its money running cafeterias and hot dog stands, says: “The world doesn’t need more wealthy men and women. It needs more men and women who know how to create wealth for others.” Neubauer came to the United States from Israel at age 14 and says he learned English from John Wayne movies.
