Natural history is not about producing fables.

This last chapter .. may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur.

A chair is the first thing you need when you don't really need anything and is, therefore, a particularly compelling symbol of civilisation. (Attributed to Ralph Caplan)

In the 1940s and 1950s, the study of natural history--an intimate science predicated on the time-consuming collection and naming of life-forms--gave way to microbiology, theoretical and commercial. Much the same thing happened to the conservation movement, which shifted from local preservationists with soil on their shoes to environmental lawyers in Washington, D.C.

He who calls what has vanished back again into being, enjoys a bliss like that of creating.

The question is, does the educated citizen know he is only a cog in an ecological mechanism? That if he will work with that mechanism his mental wealth and his material wealth can expand indefinitely? But that if he refuses to work with it, it will ultimately grind him to dust? If education does not teach us these things, then what is education for?

Another day I walked out of town to do a bit of climbing in the mountains behind the airport. I scrambled up and down slopes that contained some of the oldest rocks in the world, isotope-dated at 3,800 billion years, remnants, so the geological rumor goes, of the earth's earliest terrestrial crust.

This means that food is always in the here an now; it is everywhere and nowhere. Yet every time people eat the pliant flesh of salmon they are tasting evolution, natural history and deep time. Indeed, salmon's evolutionary, natural and life histories turned what might have otherwise been a common fish into one of the handful of most important sources of marine-derived fats and proteins the world has ever known.

I feel the need to fall in love with the world, to forge that relationship ever more strongly. But maybe I don’t have to work so hard. I have thought nature indifferent to humans, to one more human, but maybe the reverse is true. Maybe the world is already in love, giving us these gifts all the time—the glimpse of a fox, tracks in the sand, a breeze, a flower--calling out all the time: take this. And this. And this. Don’t turn away.

Must the interest of life wane for us all as the progress of knowledge curtails the playground of imagination? No doubt it must in some measure, but there is another cause.I believe that in these days we have too many occupations, too many interests; we know too many things, and, if you will, have too many advantages and facilities. Our faculty of taking an interest is dissipated and frittered away.