my delicious loose ends
Humility
“…even in the presence of the least petal and the slimmest grass blade, we are but humble guests of the grassland.”
Findings
“All of these findings are still new, but I’m in love with the idea that plants have a temperature, that they can run warm and cold when they need to, that they can send signals to species who will help them, not harm them.”
Rainforest Life
“I have strong memories of many moments of joy and amazement when I lived in the tropical rainforest: listening to the deep reverberations of chimpanzees drumming against large tree buttresses to mark their territories, or watching from the terrace of my bungalow in western Ghana as the carmine sun turned deep purple before going down over an unbroken canopy of rainforest trees. I remember my astonishment when big fish belonging to half a dozen different species jumped into our boat as we drove slowly up a narrow tributary of the Amazon River.” —Claude Martin, On the Edge: the State and Fate of the World’s Tropical Rainforests
Mirror, Mirror
“The game is well worth playing. The payoff, even if the chance of contact with human-grade aliens or higher proves forever vanishingly small, is the building of a context within which a sharper image of our own species can be drawn.”
