It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.

Look at a globe and what you are seeing really is a snapshot of the continents as they have been for just one-tenth of 1 per cent of the earths history.

As the saying goes, it takes all kinds to make the world go around, though perhaps some shouldn't go quite so far around it as others.

Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.

Roads get wider and busier and less friendly to pedestrians. And all of the development based around cars, like big sprawling shopping malls. Everything seems to be designed for the benefit of the automobile and not the benefit of the human being.

An awful lot of England is slowly eroding, in ways that I find really distressing, and an awful lot of it is the hedgerows... We're reaching the point where a lot of the English countryside looks just like Iowa - just kind of open space.