One may wonder indeed whether the pretense of superior health is not itself rapidly becoming a mental aberration.

The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human sepcies has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.

Each civilization has its own kind of pestilence and can control it only by reforming itself.

Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.

A sense of continuity with the rest of creation is a form of religious experience essential to sanity.

Clearly, health and disease cannot be defined merely in terms of anatomical, physiological, or mental attributes. Their real measure is the ability of the individual to function in a manner acceptable to himself and to the group of which he is a part.

The wooing of the Earth thus implies much more than converting the wilderness into humanized environments. It means also preserving natural environments in which to experience mysteries transcending daily life and from which to recapture, in a Proustian kind of remembrance, the awareness of the cosmic forces that have shaped humankind.