If you look right, you can see the whole world from wherever you happen to be.

It does the things we're also most concerned about. It tries very hard to stay alive. It's motivated to reproduce. It gets hungry and goes to look for food. It gets frightened. Compared to other things in the universe, we and the albatrosses are almost identical.

Any honest inquiry into the reality of nature also yields insights about ourselves.

A painting is nothing more than light reflected from the surface of a pigment-covered canvas. But a great painter can make you see the depth, make you feel the underlying emotion, make you sense the larger world. That, too, is the power of science: to sense and convey the depth and dimensionality of nature, to glance at the surface and to divine the shape of the universe around us.

Many people believe the whole catastrophe is the oil we spill, but that gets diluted and eventually disarmed over time. In fact, the oil we don't spill, the oil we collect, refine and use, produces CO2 and other gases that don't get diluted.

Whether on'e special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.

I am drawn to the wild not because it is wild but because it is sensible, logical, ordered, stable, resilient. Wild nature is everything we're struggling to regain.