BIRDING

When asked what he enjoys about birding, Bryan Pfeiffer answered: “Nothing combines … color and flight and song like birds.” That’s it in a nutshell for me too. I think of bird songs as grace notes and of birds themselves as indicators of all that’s right and good about the natural world. Birds have been my teachers, and I’m still learning from them.

IMPROVING THE WORLD

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

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 SCIENCE

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.”

ALDO LEOPOLD ON HISTORY

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.”

WHAT IS WRONG WITH US

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.”

WILD ANIMALS

In “The Language of Animals” (Wild Earth Summer 1998), Barry Lopez says: “I am alert for the luminous event, for evidence of a world beyond the rational…. I seek … the view of an indigene. And what draws me ahead is the possibility of revelation of other indigenes — the testimonies of wild animals…. I grew up in a farming valley in southern California …. The first wild animals I encountered … I came upon in the surrounding mountains and deserts. These creatures seemed more vital than domestic animals. They seemed to tremble in the aura of their own light …. Wild animals are lean. They have no burden of possessions, no need for extra clothing, eating utensils, elaborate dwellings. They are so much more integrated into the landscape than human beings are, swooping its contours and bolting down its pathways with bewildering speed. They travel uneringly through the dark. Holding their gaze, I saw the intensity and clarity I associated with the presence of a soul.”

ROGER TORY PETERSON

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.”

BEAUTY

Confucius said, “Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.”

EARTHWORMS

Darwin said of EARTHWORMS: “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world.”

PASSIONS

Thomas Eisner, Schurman Professor of Chemical Ecology at Cornell, has this to say about his high-magnification photos of the scales on a moth’s wing: “There is proof in these images that science and art, while dwelling separately in the confines of our consciousness, do merge in that vague domain of the subconscious that guides us in our passions.”

ANCIENT RHYTHMS

According to Sigurd Olson, “When one finally arrives at the point where schedules are forgotten, and becomes immersed in ancient rhythms, one begins to live.”

ANTS

In In Search of Nature, Edward O. Wilson asks, “How have ants managed to stay on top of things for a period fifty times longer than the entire history of human beings and their immediate ancestors?

The truth is that we need invertebrates, but they don’t need us. If human beings were to disappear tomorrow, the world would go on with little change. Gaia, the totality of life on Earth, would set about healing itself and return to the rich environmental states of 100,000 years ago. But if invertebrates were to disappear, it is unlikely that the human species could last more than a few months. Most of the fishes, amphibians, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction about the same time. Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and with them the physical structure of the majority of the forests and other terrestrial habitats of the world. The soil would rot. As dead vegetation piled up and dried out, narrowing and closing the channels of nutrient cycles, other complex forms of vegetation would die off, and with them the last remnants of vertebrates. The remaining fungi, after enjoying a population explosion of stupendous proportions, would also perish. Within a few decades the world would return to the state of a billion years ago, composed primarily of bacteria, algae, and a few other very simple multicellular plants.”

CURIOSITY

Josiah Wedgwood considered his nephew Charles Darwin “a man of enlarged curiosity.” Talk about understatement ….