For great many species today, fitness means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.

I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not

Most of the time pests and disease are just nature's way of telling the farmer he's doing something wrong.

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 single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

There is nothing wrong with special occasion foods, as long as every day is not a special occasion.

There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.