habit, a particularly insidious thug who chokes passion and smothers love. Habit puts us on autopilot.

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.

Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.

The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one's curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day.

Flight is nothing but an attitude in motion.

In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that rocky moral terrain, what makes the horror palatable, and the paradox we could not defend by reason melts into a jungle of sweet temptations.

Much of life becomes background, but it is the province of art to throw buckets of light into the shadows and make life new again.