In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.

In the countryside, litter doesn't have a friend. It doesn't have anybody who's saying, 'Wait a minute, this is really starting to get out of control.'

Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

Life just wants to be; but it doesn't want to be much.

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five times as much viatmin C as the average person today.

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.

Strange as it may seem, wrote Richard Feynman, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the Sun far better than we understand the interior of the Earth.