Annual plants are nature's emergency medical service, seeded in sounds and scars to hold the land until the perennial cover is re-established.

You can't be a critic by simply being a griper. One has also to search out the examples of good work.

Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.

Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.

Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.

The worst example of rural poverty is that of migrant farm workers. They have no permanent jobs, so they have no equity in the places where they work. They're not shareholders, let alone entrepreneurs. They're not small farmers, they're not market gardeners, they're just temporary - uprooted, isolated, easily exploitable people.

Nature is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think.