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A Closer Look at Life

"This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes and humans."   --Brian Swimme

"Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate Earth; our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human."   --David Abram, from The Spell of the Sensuous

"In the Bible, the story of creation starts with the creation of the Earth and plant and animal species. Only toward the end was the human species created. To me this says that the rest of creation doesn't really need our species, but that it is we human beings who need the other species. If humankind had been created first, I usually say, we would have died the following day. That understanding should humble us and make us work hard to protect and preserve all other living things, because our survival depends on their survival."   --Wangari Maathai

"One grand great life throbs
through earth's giant heart,
And mighty waves of single
Being roll
From nerveless germ to man, for
we are part
Of every rock and bird and beast
and hill,
One with the things that prey on
us, and one with what we kill."
  --Oscar Wilde, Panthea

"I believe the first living cell
Had echoes of the future in it and felt
Direction and the great animals, the deep green forest
And whale's-track sea; I believe this globed earth
Not all by chance and fortune brings forth her broods,
But feels and chooses. And the galaxy, the firewheel
On which we are pinned, the whirlwind of stars in which our sun is
one dust grain, one electron, this giant atom of the universe
Is not blind force, but fulfills its life, and intends its courses."
  --Robinson Jeffers, De Rerum Virtute

"We lost the poetry of the Earth under the illusion that the sciences, in revealing to us the physical functioning of the natural world, were revealing to us the true reality of things. Poetry and music became not the quintessence of our earthly experience but something illusory, affected, unreal.

Ultimately we lost the vast world of meaning without which humans become unbearable even to themselves. Even the natural world could not function in such conditions. A withering from within as well as extinction from without has been taking place throughout the entire natural world. For the deeds of humans have an impact not only on the physical forms but also on the inner life principles governing the natural world. Even while we foster our ecological and environmental movements . . . none of this will ultimately succeed unless it expresses a true intimacy with this larger Earth community."    --Thomas Berry, from To Honor the Earth

[Photos ©COMSTOCK IMAGES]

"Man--despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments--owes his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains." --Author Unknown

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