We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

If you can't pronounce it, you shouldn't be eating it.

A natural historian is somebody who looks at something in terms of its relationship to the rest of the natural world. You look at things ecologically. When you see a cow on a feedlot, you don't just see a cow; you see a cow that is eating certain food. You follow that food and that food takes you back to a corn field.

Stop eating before you're full.

Twenty thousand birds moved away from me as one, like a ground-hugging white cloud, clucking softly.

Ripe vegetables were magic to me. Unharvested, the garden bristled with possibility. I would quicken at the sight of a ripe tomato, sounding its redness from deep amidst the undifferentiated green. To lift a bean plant's hood of heartshaped leaves and discover a clutch of long slender pods handing underneath could make me catch my breath.

The environment is not just around you, it's passing through you.