181–200 of 235
About sixty-five million years ago, at the end of the Mesozoic era and the beginning of the Cenozoic, the niche once dominated by the dinosaurs was available for other creatures. The opportunistic could move into that niche now empty of large reptiles, and prosper in their place. Among these creatures that flourished…
Once you know about sitters and rovers, you see them everywhere, especially among young children. Drop in on your local Mommy and Me music class: there are the sitters, intently watching the action from their mothers’ laps, while the rovers march around the room banging their drums and shaking their maracas. Relaxed…
Europe. America. lb. lb. Mammoth Buffalo. Bison *1800 White bear. Ours blanc Caribou. Renne Bear. Ours 153.7 *410 Elk. Elan. Orignal, palmated Red deer. Cerf 288.8 *273 Fallow deer. Daim 167.8 Wolf. Loup 69.8 Roe. Chevreuil 56.7 Glutton. Glouton. Carcajou Wild cat. Chat sauvage 30 Lynx. Loup cervier 25. Beaver. Castor…
The sound of the insect orchestra swells and throbs night after night, from midsummer until autumn ends and the frosty nights make the tiny players stiff and numb, and finally the last note is stilled in the long cold. An hour of hunting out the small musicians by flashlight is an adventure any child would love. It…
Of course, we can combine natural history study with gardening, hunting, owning pets, and other pursuits that keep us close to the earth. The more such activities, the better, in terms of a full, rich, characterbuilding relationship to nature. But natural history study provides training in another key environmental…
Of course, naturalists’ activities themselves can go astray or fail to provide their full benefits. Rachel Carson warned that “it is possible to compile extensive lists of creatures seen and identified without ever once having caught a breathtaking glimpse of the wonder of life.”22 A concern to have the newest…
The passage shows how different aspects of virtue connect. Patience is part intellectual virtue, part moral virtue and part physical virtue, as it is portrayed here. The humility which allows Leopold to lie down in the muck unselfconsciously is a moral virtue, but humble recognition of our own ignorance is also a key…
One day I buried myself, prone, in the muck of a muskrat house. While my clothes absorbed local color, my eyes absorbed the lore of the marsh. A hen redhead cruised by with her convoy of ducklings, pink-billed fluffs of greenish-golden down. A Virginia rail nearly brushed my nose. The shadow of a pelican sailed over a…
Most human and natural communities now consist both of long-term residents and of new arrivals, and ecosystems are emerging that never existed before. It is impractical to try to restore ecosystems to some ‘rightful' historical state. For example, of the 30 planned plant eradication efforts undertaken in the Galapagos…
The British and Irish emphasis on drawing from nature (which has lessened in those places, too) helped develop powers of observation and reinforced curiosity about the natural world. A child who has watched whirligigs and water striders on the surface of a stream will appreciate the importance of clean water. A child…
WE HAVE, it seems, a fierce attraction for spirits: auras, angels, poltergeists, disembodied souls, out-of-body experiences. Mostly, I think, we are drawn to these things because we intuit—correctly, it turns out—that there must be more to the world than meets the eye. We inherit the spirit world from a time when our…
In one of his most popular essays, "The Colloid and the Crystal," the nature writer Joseph Wood Krutch wrote about these opposing forces in nature. "Order and obedience are the primary characteristics of that which is not alive," he wrote. "Life is rebellious and anarchical." He was wrong to identify obedience and…
31 I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to…
A crushing backload, indeed: fiddlehead ferns, downy woodpecker, pickerel, granite flake. Canada mayflower, moonrise, bluebirds, spring peepers, monarch butterflies, glacial scratches on bedrock, and, of course, the human history of my path, which in its transformations over the centuries encapsulates in many…
When I undertook to answer My own 1927 self-questioning: "Why have humans been included In the design of Universe?" My hypothetical answer of 1927 Was, and as yet is: What impresses me most Is the experientially demonstrable fact That all living organisms Other than humans Have some organically integral equipment That…
The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenatrable for us really exists and manifests itself as…
When I was a fairly precocious young man I became thoroughly impressed with the futility of the hopes and strivings that chase most men restlessly through life. Moreover, I soon discovered the cruelty of that chase, which in those years was much more carefully covered up by hypocrisy and glittering words than is the…
"Why did you not come when I called you?" said the blind man. "Must you be led like a child? Cannot you hear the path as you walk?" Nunez laughed. "I can see it," he said. "There is no such word as see," said the blind man, after a pause. "Cease this folly and follow the sound of my feet." Nunez followed, a little…
Our response to the natural world is one of reverence and humility in the face of a mystery that transcends empirical knowing-now, certainly, and perhaps forever. "Agnostic" does not do justice to the celebratory aspect of our position. Nor does "pantheist" adequately express our sense of what nature hides…
Pets have all the qualities necessary to be a virus of the mind: - Pets penetrate our minds by attracting our attention. The quality they have that gets them attention is something like "cuteness" or "adorability." - Pets actually program us to take care of them in several ways. The animals themselves take advantage…