Quotes from Alan Weisman

Today's amount of plastic will take hundreds of thousands of years to consume, but, eventually, it will all biodegrade. Lignin is far more complex, and it biodegrades. It's just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up with the materials we are making.

Bred to the pavement and steel that became his life's work, he nonetheless marvels at the annual miracle of baby peregrine falcons hatching high atop the George Washington's towers, and at the sheer botanical audacity of grass, weeds, and ailanthus trees that defiantly bloom, far from topsoil, from metal niches suspended high above the water.

Before them will lie billions of other galaxies, over distances we can quantify but can't really comprehend.

Removing his sunglasses, Sala shakes his head. "I'm so amazed," he says, "by the ability of life to hang on to anything. Given the opportunity, it goes everywhere. A species as creative and arguably intelligent as our own should somehow find a way to achieve a balance. We have a lot to learn, obviously. But I haven't given up on us.

To interviewers who lamented that life in the time of plague had become so unreal, I'd reply that no, actually *this* was real. What's unreal is the fantasy we humans have been living: growing on and on, in denial of the obvious.

in the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house - our houses.

Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same.

Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.

Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society's energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.

All of us humans have myriad other species to thank. Without them, we couldn't exist. It's that simple, and we can't afford to ignore them, anymore than I can afford to neglect my precious wife--nor the sweet mother Earth that births and holds us all. Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.

in the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house - our houses.

Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same.

Paranormalists, however, insist that our minds are transmitters that, with special effort, can focus like lasers to communicate across great distances, and even make things happen. That may seem far-fetched, but it's also a definition of prayer.

Whether we accept it or not, this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our planet. It will come about in one of two ways: Either we decide to manage our own numbers, to avoid a collision of every line on civilization's graph - or nature will do it for us, in the form of famines, thirst, climate chaos, crashing ecosystems, opportunistic disease, and wars over dwindling resources that finally cut us down to size.

But the Earth holds ghosts, even of entire nations.

plastic-wrapped evermore?

The Panama Canal,' says Abdiel Perez, 'is like a wound that humans inflicted on the Earth--one that nature is trying to heal.

We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.

Missing, however, are nearly all fauna adapted to us. The seemingly invincible cockroach, a tropical import, long ago froze in unheated apartment buildings. Without garbage, rats starved or became lunch for the raptors nesting in burnt-out skyscrapers.

Apart from stemming consumption, the most intractable puzzle that Paul Ehrlich has encountered is why health decisions about Mother Nature—the mother that gives us life and breath—are made by politicians, not by scientists who know how critical her condition is. "It's the immoral equivalent of insurance company accountants making decisions about our personal health." Even

You understand... just what the Taoists mean when they say that soft is stronger than hard.

Puszcza, an old Polish word, means "forest primeval." Straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, the half-million acres of the Bia?owie?a Puszcza contain Europe's last remaining fragment of old-growth, lowland wilderness.

La idea de crear una sociedad pacífica por medio de un conflicto armado parecía estar irremediablemente condenada al fracaso por su misma contradicción.

The real reason that the world's landfills weren't overflowing with plastic, he found, was because most of it ends up in an ocean-fill. After a few years of sampling the North Pacific gyre, Moore