Grasslands Quotes

• We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.

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  Wendell Berry

  Children   Ocean   Lakes  

  Wendell Berry (2010). “What Are People For?: Essays”, p.188, Counterpoint Press

  2153

• Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.

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  E. O. Wilson

  Past   People   Labyrinth  

  3288

• Burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares.

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  Allan Savory

  Inspirational   Motivational   Years  

  1830

• If we took 75% of the world’s trashed rangeland, we could restore it from agriculture back to functioning prairies — with their animal cohorts — in under fifteen years. We could further sequester all of the carbon that has been released since the beginning of the industrial age. So I find that a hopeful thing because, frankly, we just have to get out of the way. Nature will do the work for us. This planet wants to be grassland and forest. It does not want to be an agricultural mono-crop.

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  Lierre Keith

  Animal   Years   Agriculture  

  3130

• We simulated the predator with livestock and the perennial grassland returned. Just put the whole back, and there it was. You'll find the scientific method never discovers anything. Observant, creative people make discoveries. But the scientific method protects us from cranks like me.

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  Allan Savory

  Discovery   People   Creative  

  3026

• I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands.

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  Rebecca Solnit

  Sky   Space   Desert  

  Rebecca Solnit (2010). “A Field Guide To Getting Lost”, p.59, Canongate Books

  3236

• By 2050, at bio-extinction's current rate, between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of all species will have disappeared or be too few in numbers to survive. There'll be a few over-visited parks, the coral reefs will be beaten up, grasslands overgrazed. Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas.

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  Stuart L. Pimm

  Weed   Numbers   Tree  

  "Mass Extinction Not Inevitable". The Wired Interview, www.wired.com. March 20, 2004.

  4720

• You cannot begin to preserve any species of animal unless you preserve the habitat in which it dwells. Disturb or destroy that habitat and you will exterminate the species as surely as if you had shot it. So conservation means that we have to preserve forest and grassland, river and lake, even the sea itself. This is vital not only for the preservation of animal life generally, but for the future existence of man himself - a point that seems to escape many people.

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  Gerald Durrell

  Mean   Animal   Men  

  "Two in the Bush". Book by Gerald Durrell, 1966.

  4380

• Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary.

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  John Medina

  Exercise   Brain   Cubicles  

  2193

• Peace. The upland serenity of high altitude, the openness of grassland without indigenous bush or trees; the greening, yellowing or silver-browning that prevailed, according to season.

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  Nadine Gordimer

  Peace   Tree   Serenity  

  Nadine Gordimer (2012). “The Conservationist”, p.20, Bloomsbury Publishing

  5175

• I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems, the oceans, the rainforests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it.

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  Jerry Brown

  Strong   Ocean   Overcoming  

  222