Ruined land was accepted as the collateral damage of progress. - Robin Wall Kimmerer

it delights me that I can be learning an ancient language by completely modern technologies, sitting at my office, eating lunch, learning Potawatomi grammar.

There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents.

One of the difficulties of moving in the scientific world is that when we name something, often with a scientific name, this name becomes almost an end to inquiry. We sort of say, Well, we know it now. We’re able to systematize it and put a Latin binomial on it, so it’s ours. We know what we need to know. But that is only in looking, of course, at the morphology of the organism, at the way that it looks. It ignores all of its relationships. It’s such a mechanical, wooden representation of what a plant really is. And we reduce them tremendously, if we just think about them as physical elements of the ecosystem.