Do you think people have evolved too far, because I do; oh their ability to heal is indeed a wonder and I do praise them for that, but in many other things I think evolution has been a bit rushed, like getting to the bus stop before the wheel was invented.

I want to be in the water with you again, nani girl.' Her knees went weak and trembles raced down her spine. Beautiful girl had been a special nickname only he used.

Another big group of dolphins had just surfaced alongside our moving vessel—leaping and splashing and calling mysteriously back and forth in their squeally, whistly way, with many babies swift alongside their mothers. And this time, confined to just the surface of such deep and lovely lives, I was becoming unsatisfied. I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling, and so—close. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that was forbidden fruit: Who are you? Science usually steers firmly from questions about the inner lives of animals. Surely they have inner lives of some sort. But like a child who is admonished that what they really want to ask is impolite, a young scientist is taught that the animal mind—if there is such—is unknowable. Permissible questions are “it” questions: where it lives; what it eats; what it does when danger threatens; how it breeds. But always forbidden—always forbidden—is the one question that might open the door: “Who?” — Carl Safina.

A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

Nature responds to your respect and gratitude by creating a magical energy of blessings in return.

Do you know how many acres of beautiful forests and moors have been destroyed by your company? How many animals have lost their homes and how many trees have been murdered? I am sick of being bothered by you people.

Management' of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.

But wasn't that progress too, that the elephants were killed off like the mastodon and giant rhino before them, like all other wildlife and wild places? 'We can't stop time,' MacAdam said. 'But you can change the way it goes,' Nehemiah insisted.