Because we can't escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.

Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time it will return to its original form, just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid-out cities into a weed-way.

We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.

Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.

For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.

Adventure is not something you travel to find. It's something you take with you, or you're not going to find it when you arrive.

Variety is the pledge that matter makes to living things.