Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn’t an “issue” to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.
~ Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.
~ Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder
We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.
~ Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Standing on the beach at the Point where the Manokin River meets Tangier Sound.
It should not surprise that so elemental a word as point has several geographic meanings. Wherever land meets water, from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Point Pleasant, Florida, point describes the projection of dry ground into the surrounding sea, bay, lake, or river. In Appalachia, point may refer to the termination of a mountain ridge projecting into a confluence of valleys. Even on prairies, points abound…In river morphology, a point is the inside or convex curve of a meander, where sediment tends to aggrade. The condition of vegetation on a stream’s meander point is a useful indicator of its ecological health: if vegetation is colonizing the point, the health trend is likely positive. The state of the meander point is usually a better indicator of the stream’s overall condition than the presence or absence of erosion on the concave or outer curve of the channel. Erosion and consequent bank collapse on the outside of the bend can be a natural feature of the stream’s morphological dynamic.
~ William DeBuys, Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney
Touch is a reciprocal action, a gesture of exchange with the world. To make an impression is also to receive one, and the soles of our feet, shaped by the surfaces they press upon, are landscapes themselves with their own worn channels and roving lines. They perhaps most closely resemble the patterns of ridge and swirl revealed when a tide has ebbed over flat sand.
~ Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot
