There is no better high than discovery.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.

Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't, the love and the pleasure will have been enough.

I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.

Every ecosystem, even a small one, is sustainable because it has certain ensembles and conditions and influences that are unique to it. And the biological ensembles are almost certainly, even the most modest ones, in the thousands of species. We don't know what's involved in the models - not even the beginnings. And yet we're trying to make a sustainable world, which has to include the natural world. The human species is triumphant, but it's got to get a grip. It's got to come to understand what's happened, why we're this way and what we're doing.