If you ask the fish whether they'd rather have an oil spill or a season of fishing, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd vote for another blowout.

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.

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.

Economists don't seem to have noticed that the economy sits entirely within the ecology.

Windy or not, a day this beautiful has to be lived. The day is bright and clear, the sky blue, and the dry air feels light. A northerly wind stirs a primal urge to move. The geese feel it, and so do I. Perhaps it is a last internal vestige from a time, long ago, when we migrated with the seasons across open plains, following the animals we pursued for food. Perhaps that is why the sight of migrating geese arrests our attention, why we feel the pull. We want to go, to travel in fresh or moody weather, taking in each newly revealed vista.

Several groups have information evaluating seafood sustainability. I wrote the first such guide, and seafood pocket-guides and detailed evaluations of different seafoods are available for download from the group I founded, Blue Ocean Institute.

Fishing provides time to think, and reason not to. If you have the virtue of patience, an hour or two of casting alone is plenty of time to review all you’ve learned about the grand themes of life.