Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.

Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.

And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.

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.

I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive.

We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention