“We in the United States have done so much to destroy our own resources, our timber, our land, our fishes, that we should be taken as a horrible example and our methods avoided by any government and people enlightened enough to envision a continuing economy. With our own resources we have been prodigal, and our country will not soon lose the scars of our grasping stupidity.”
– John Steinbeck in The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951)
“These magnificent animals are killed oftentimes for their tusks along, like buffaloes for their tongues, ostriches for their feathers, or for mere sport and exercise. In nothing does man, with his great notions of heaven and charity, show forth his innate, low-bred, wild animalism more clearly than in his treatment of his brother beasts. From the shepherd with his lambs to the red-handed hunter, it is the same; no recognition of rights — only murder in one form or another.” — John Muir commenting on the slaughter of the walruses on the polar ice pack in The Cruise of the Corwin. The photo: bison skulls waiting to be ground into fertilizer, circa 1870
Excerpts from Writing the Siege of Leningrad; Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (2002), collected and edited by Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina:
“G. Popov dropped in on us today and played the piano. He called me into the room and started to play Ravel’s ‘Promenade in auto.’ At the most bravura place he says: ‘They’re shooting.’ I tried to calm him down, but he ran to the window. High in the sky there were white balls of explosions — the desperate efforts of the anti-aircraft guns. Suddenly, from behind the roofs a white cloud started to grow; it expanded quickly and other clouds piled on this one. They were all dyed amber in the setting sun. They filled up the entire sky; then the clouds turned bronze, while from below a black stripe started moving upwards. It was so unlike smoke that for a long time I could not comprehend that it was fire. They say it was the oil tanks and Badaev warehouses burning. It was an immense spectacle of stunning beauty.”
– From the diary of Liubov’ Vasil’evna Shaporina, September 8, 1941
“They had sounded an air-raid alarm with the late dawn of a day in December. I was in the attic, frozen to the bone and, as always, hungry. My partner, Tat’iana Novikova, and I had agreed to take turns running home to get warmed up and have a bite to eat. I hadn’t managed to enter my room and get as far as the warm stove before some gigantic power silently lifted the building, which then settled down ponderously with a heavy thud. The floor underneath me began to sway, and I only barely managed to stay on my feet. A horrible crash followed, the glass in the windows blew out, the doors flew wide open. In a state of utter terror I ran out into the courtyard. The yard was filled with an impenetrable column of dust that was swirling upward. It was impossible to see what was happening. Only here and there columns of red flame shot through, which, as it later became clear, turned out to be columns of brick dust. From those around I learned that two bombs had fallen on our building…”
– Sof’ia Nikolaevna Buriakova
“…even though it was so deadly cold, and almost everyone’s windows were broken, even then not one Leningrader cut a living tree. No one ever did that. Because we loved our city, and we could not deprive it of its greenery… They could tear down a fence, break up some kiosk, tear off an outer door. But they couldn’t saw down a tree. They burned furniture, various rags, letters (it was painful to burn letters). They burned many books (also a pity).”
– Ol’ga Nikolaevna Grechina
“Generally in the wintertime, corpses lay along the sidewalks wrapped in sheets, legs and necks bound by string. This is how families buried them. Next to our entrance lay a woman who asked us to help her get up, so that she could make it to her building on Pushkinskaia Street. My mother didn’t have the strength for this. For a long time afterward, that woman lay there dead.”
– Natal’ia Vladimirovna Stroganova
“As a result of bomb and artillery attacks and fires, many libraries of private individuals and institutions were left totally unguarded, in ruins or open to the sky, and they were destroyed by fire, water, or inclement weather. The library staff took it upon themselves to gather and preserve this wealth of books. This work demanded incredible strength. The books had to be picked out of destroyed buildings, lowered through the window frames, extracted from under piles of bricks, and carried on one’s back (only much later was the library supplied with a car for this).”
– Lila Solomonova Frankfurt of the Saltykov-Shchedrin National Public Library
“Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values…. God made life simple. It is man who complicates it.”
– Charles A. Lindbergh
“The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself.”
– Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953)
“As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: ‘With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas,’ or, ‘They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.’ “
– U Thant
“Nature’s laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.”
– Luther Burbank
“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
– Carl Sagan
“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”
– Albert Schweitzer
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.”
– Wallace Stegner, in a letter, December 3, 1960
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”
– Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
“This is a beautiful planet and not at all fragile. Earth can withstand significant volcanic eruptions, tectonic cataclysms, and ice ages. But this canny, intelligent, prolific, and extremely self-centered human creature had proven himself capable of more destruction of life than Mother Nature herself…. We’ve got to be stopped.”
– Michael L. Fischer, Harper’s, July 1990
“Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?”
– Pierre Troubetzkoy (1864-1936)
“Any grove or any wood is a fine thing to see. But the magic here, strangely, is not apparent from the road. It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. By this, an act of faith is committed, through which one accepts blindly the communion cup of beauty. One is now inside the grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. Enchantment lies in different things for each of us. For me, it is in this: to step out of the bright sunlight into the shade of orange trees; to walk under the arched canopy of their jadelike leaves; to see the long aisles of lichened trunks stretch ahead in a geometric rhythm; to feel the mystery of a seclusion that yet has shafts of light striking through it.
“This is the essence of an ancient and secret magic. It goes back, perhaps, to the fairy tales of childhood, to Hansel and Gretel, to Babes in the Wood, to Alice in Wonderland, to all half-luminous places that pleased the imagination as a child. It may go back still farther, to racial Druid memories, to an atavistic sense of safety and delight in an open forest. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home. An old thread, long tangled, comes straight again.”
– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings in Cross Creek, the 1942 Charles Scribner’s Sons edition with illustrations by Edward Shenton
Seen on my walk home, a tree fungus serving as an awning over the entrance to a squirrel’s nest.
“Our canoes go with the river, but no longer easily or lazily. Every step of the way must be carefully chosen; now close to the steep bank where the bushes hang over; now in mid-stream among the huge pointed rocks; now by the lowest point of a broad sunken ledge where the water sweeps smoothly over to drop into the next pool. The boy and I, using the bow paddles, are in the front of the adventure, guessing at the best channel, pushing aside suddenly to avoid treacherous stones hidden with dark moss, dashing swiftly down the long dancing rapids, with the shouting of the waves in our ears and the sprinkle of the foam in our faces.
“From side to side of the wild avenue through the forest we turn and dart, zigzagging among the rocks. Thick woods shut us in on either hand, pines and hemlocks and firs and spruces, beeches and maples and yellow-birches, alders with their brown seed cones, and mountain-ashes with their scarlet berries. All four of us know the way; there can be no doubt about that, for down the river is the only road out. But none of us knows the path; for this is a new stream, you remember, and between us and our journey’s end there lie a thousand possible difficulties, accidents, and escapes.”
– From “A Holiday on a Vacation,” in Days Off and Other Digressions (1907) by Henry Van Dyke; illustration by Frank Schoonover.
I cannot do this justice, but there it is: Last night, thunder, lightning and sheets of freezing rain, and a midnight plunge in temperature. Today, cold, sunny, and every twig and branch shining like a diamond.
“Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth by glad;
let the sea thunder and all that is in it;
let the field be joyful and all that is therein.
Then shall all the trees of the wood shout for joy before the Lord when he comes,
when he comes to judge the earth.”
– Psalm 96: 11-12
