Fauna Quotes

I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime

Sadly, I hate foreigners. And Americans. And animals. And flora, and some fauna. Also the magma that is the very core of this our mother earth. I'm full o' hate!

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.

If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space―space even more than time.

Este equilibrio entre humanos, flora y fauna empezó a tambalearse cuando los primeros se convirtieron ellos mismos en presa; o, mejor dicho, en mercancía.

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.

It was a matter of some sorrow to Fauna that she didn't entirely believe in astrology, but she had found that nearly everyone wants to believe that the stars take notice of us.

Mr. Kadam asked me many questions about Oregon. He seemed to have an unquenchable thirst for learning new facts and asked me about everything from sports, which I know almost nothing about, to politics, which I know absolutely nothing about, to the flora and fauna of the state, which I know a lot about.

Out of the trees wild people stepped forth, gods Fauns and Satyrs and Dwarfs. Out of the river rose the river god with his Naiad daughters. And all these and all the beasts and birds in their different voices, low or high or thick or clear, replied: "Hail, Aslan. We hear and obey. We are awake. We love. We think. We speak. We know.

I had no lock that could be picked. If anything, I was the landscape behind the door, and even on that day in the ruin, I was still only beginning to comprehend my own flora and fauna.

There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.

Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass.

Dreams were the worst. Of course I dreamed of food and love, but they were pleasant rather than otherwise. But then I'd dream of things like slitting a baby's throat, mistaking it for a baby goat. I'd have nightmares of other islands stretching away from mine, infinities of islands, islands spawning islands, like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs of islands, knowing that I had to live on each and every one, eventually, for ages, registering their flora, their fauna, their geography.

Apakah aku sudah keterlaluan menjauhkan diri dari bangsaku? Apakah alasanku benar alasan jujur ataukah dalih menjauhkan diri dari bangsa yang masih hidup di dalam alam masa agrarian kuno ini? Yang masih primitif mendekati flora dan fauna rimba belantara? Itulah penderitaan jiwaku.

So quietly flows the Seine that one hardly notices its presence. It is always there, quiet and unobtrusive, like a great artery running through the human body. In the wonderful peace that fell over me itseemed as if I had climbed to the top of a high mountain; for a little while I would be able to look around me, to take in the meaning of the landscape. Human beings make a strange fauna and flora. From a distance they appear negligible; close up they are apt to appear ugly and malicious. More than anything they need to be surrounded with sufficient space – space even more than time. The sun is setting. I feel this river flowing through meits past, its ancient soil, the changing climate. The hills gently girdle it about: its course is fixed.

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire? Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

It seems to me absolutely true, that our world, which appears to us the surface of all things, is really the bottom of a deep ocean: all our trees are submarine growths, and we are weird, scaly-clad submarine fauna, feeding ourselves on offal like shrimps. Only occasionally the soul rises gasping through the fathomless fathoms under which we live, far up to the surface of the ether, where there is true air.

(on the word "fuck") 'Oh, come on, Mum,' I sighed at her protest. 'It's just an old Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ which has been adopted by an inherently misogynist language as a negative epithet. It's the same as "fuck", it basically means the same as copulate, but the latter is perfectly acceptable. Why? Because copulate has its roots in Latin and Latin reminds us that we are a sophisticated, learned species, not the rutting animals that these prehistoric grunts would have us appear to be, and isn't that really the issue here? We don't want to admit that we are essentially animals? We want to distinguish ourselves from the fauna with grand conceits and elaborate language; become angels worthy of salvation, not dumb creatures consigned to an earthly, terminal end. It's just a word, Mum; a sound meaning a thing; and your disgust is just denial of a greater horror: that our consciousness is not an indication of our specialness but the terrifying key to knowing how truly insignificant we are.' She told me to got fuck myself.

She had racked her piecemeal recollection of her species' history and found only a hierarchy of destruction: of her species devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself. Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them — not even its own reflection.

Embora não nos apercebamos disso, a Terra é um ser vivo constituído por biliões de seres vivos, as células, a Terra é um ser vivo constituído por biliões de seres vivos, a fauna e a flora. Por exemplo, se a temperatura mudar muito na Lua ou em Vénus, isso é indiferente para esses planetas, uma vez que estão ambos mortos, não passam de pedra e poeira. Tanto lhes faz que faça muito frio como muito calor, os planetas mortos são como esculturas de mármore. Mas as alterações térmicas não são indiferentes para a Terra, que se encontra viva e que, por isso, está constantemente a regular a sua temperatura e composição

Me miró, desde su altura, de una manera tal que me dio vuelta todo lo que tenía en el alma. Si alguien me mirara así cada tres o cuatro meses, estoy seguro de que mi vida sería digna de una biografía en varios tomos. En la mirada esa había de todo: agresión y ternura, desafío y ruego, erotismo, desdén, caricias, puñales, hielo, fuego, música… Me sentí como si un caballo me hubiera pateado la cabeza con las herraduras de los dos cascos traseros al mismo tiempo, pero dándose maña para hacerme sentir que me estaba haciendo un favor.

#MeToo is about the myriad ways straight men are failing us—not just by being predators like Harvey Weinstein, but also by ignoring our consent in seemingly smaller ways too. It’s about men disregarding our boundaries in intimate situations because they’ve been taught every dick move is fair in the search for a mate, like we’re all just exotic fauna on their hunting safari.

The earth is not our home. We came from nothing, and to that condition our nostalgia should turn. Why would anyone care about this dim bulb in the blackness of space? The earth produced us, or at least subsidized our evolution. Is it really entitled to receive a pardon, let alone the sacrifice of human lives, for this original sin—a capital crime in reverse (very much in the same way that reproduction makes one an accessory before the fact to an individual’s death)? Someone once said that nature abhors a vacuum. This is precisely why nature should be abhorred. Instead, the nonhuman environment is simultaneously extolled and ravaged by a company of poor players who can no longer act naturally. It is one thing for the flora and fauna to feed and fight and breed in an unthinking continuance of their existence. It is quite another for us to do so in defiance of our own minds, which over and again pose the same question: “What are we still doing in this horrible place?

The day was warming fast, the air weighted with the sweetness of clover and grass and pasture scents. A dunnock fluted notes from its perch in an ancient hedge, while robins called from the treetops.

But the Count hadn’t the temperament for revenge; he hadn’t the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn’t the fanciful ego to dram of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world’s Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island’s topography, it’s climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.

Similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest islands evidence of the existence of birds, insects and snails that lived there for countless generations, only to vanish when the first human farmers arrived. None but a few extremely remote islands escaped man’s notice until the modern age, and these islands kept their fauna intact. The Galapagos Islands, to give one famous example, remained uninhabited by humans until the nineteenth century, thus preserving their unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like the ancient diprotodons, show no fear of humans. The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans.

There can be no doubt that the existing Fauna and Flora is but the last term of a long series of equally numerous contemporary species, which have succeeded one another, by the slow and gradual substitution of species for species, in the vast interval of time which has elapsed between the deposition of the earliest fossiliferous strata and the present day.

David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because species disappear when their habitat does, he photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, card from the deck of the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another. Plants and animals are a language, even in our reduced, domesticated English, where children grow like weeds or come out smelling like roses, the market is made up of bulls and bears, politics of hawks and doves. Like cards, flora and fauna could be read again and again, not only alone but in combination, in the endlessly shifting combinations of a nature that tells its own stories and colors ours, a nature we are losing without even knowing the extent of that loss.

Doc turned in the seat and looked back. The disappearing sun shone on his laughing face, his gay and eager face. With his left hand he held the bucking steering wheel. Cannery Row looked after the ancient car. It made the first turn and was gone from sight behind a warehouse just as the sun was gone. Fauna said, 'I wonder if I'd be safe to put up her gold star tonight. What the hell's the matter with you, Mack?' Mack said, 'Vice is a monster so frightful of mien, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.' He put his arm around Hazel's shoulders. 'I think you'd of made a hell of a president,' he said.

A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth’s past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth’s flora and fauna–including all the famous outsized dinosaurs.

Manusia dibebani harapan, cita-cita dan tanggungjawab dalam kehidupan. Sejak jejaka hingga tua, mereka berperanan mencipta, mengatur dan membina benda, yang dinamakan peradaban lahiriah. Mereka diasuh dan mengasuh, dalam proses pertumbuhan tamadun fikir. Tetapi mereka itu juga - semua lahir dari ibu - sudah, sedang dan masih akan jadi pemusnah benda dan berbunuhan sesama manusia, membunuh fauna dan menghancurkan flora.

What is needed today is a fundamental re-experience of the oneness of all living things, a comprehensive reality consciousness that ever more infrequently develops spontaneously, the more the primordial flora and fauna of our mother earth must yield to a dead technological environment.

There’s been a right of way through here for centuries – before that house even existed. You’re the ones trespassing. Local people have always walked among these trees … using their wood, their flora and fauna. There’s a unique convergence of ley lines here. Keeping people away from the land

To Nature nothing can be added; from Nature nothing can be taken away; the sum of her energies is constant, and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in the applications of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total. The law of conservation rigidly excludes both creation and annihilation. Waves may change to ripples, and ripples to waves; magnitude may be substituted for number, and number for magnitude; asteroids may aggregate to suns, suns may resolve themselves into florae and faunae, and floras and faunas melt in air: the flux of power is eternally the same. It rolls in music through the ages, and all terrestrial energy—the manifestations of life as well as the display of phenomena—are but the modulations of its rhythm.

If the rocky ejecta from an impact hails from a planet with life, then microscopic fauna could have stowed away in the rocks’ nooks and crannies. Third, recent evidence suggests that shortly after the formation of our solar system, Mars was wet, and perhaps fertile, even before Earth was. Collectively, these findings tell us it’s conceivable that life began on Mars and later seeded life on Earth, a process known as panspermia. So all Earthlings might—just might—be descendants of Martians.

The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the delight of morning. Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life-forms. Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

Compared to forest or aquatic ecosystems, grassland is unstable. It requires rather precise geological and climatic conditions, and if these conditions are not maintained--if too much rain falls, or too little--it quickly turns into forest or desert, both of which are dominated by woody plants. This instability is reflected in the spectacular but brief careers of various grassland faunas. Humanity, with its dazzling symbioses, preadaptations, and neoteny, is the most spectacular of these--and may well be the briefest.

The only company you should enjoy most is nature’s company, because nature has a way of revealing your individuality.

-O sa ai necazuri, spuse bacanul. -E necesar din cand in cand, zise Fauna. Ca sa te simti intr-adevar bine, trebuie sa fii fraier macar o data in viata.

-Doc, spuse Fauna, am vazut de toate in viata mea. Crede-ma, daca ai ceva de doamna in tine, iti strici toata viata.

He loved Minnesota’s flora and fauna and seemed ill-suited as either a fawner or floorer, a

Of strangers asking her over and over again what she was. Like a piece of flora or fauna. Like she was missing her proper taxonomy.

Manusia adalah malaikat cacat Cacat oleh nafsu Manusia adalah fauna sempurna Sempurna oleh akal

Secondly, when climate change causes mass extinctions, sea creatures are usually hit as hard as land dwellers. Yet there is no evidence of any significant disappearance of oceanic fauna 45,000 years ago.

Pero precisamente por ser un veterano en estas lides puedo afirmar con énfasis que no existe en el mundo mejor lugar que el autobús para explorar la rica fauna humana, en vivo y sin prejuicios antropológicos

When I got to Crude Sciences at the end of the day, Dante was waiting for me at our table. This time, with no Latin book, no journal. “Hello,” he said, pulling my chair out for me. Surprised, I sat down next to him, trying not to stare at his perfectly formed arms. “Hi,” I said, with an attempt at nonchalance. “How are you?” I could feel his eyes on me. “Fine,” I said carefully, as Professor Starking handed out our lab assignments. Dante frowned. “Not very talkative today, I see.” I thrust a thermometer into the muddy water of the fish tank in front of us, which was supposed to represent an enclosed ecosystem. “So now you want to talk? Now that you’ve finished your Latin homework?” After a prolonged period of silence, he spoke. “It was research.” “Research on what?” “It doesn’t matter anymore.” I threw him a suspicious look. “Why’s that?” “Because I realized I wasn’t paying attention to the right thing.” “Which is?” I asked, looking back at the board as I smoothed out the hem of my skirt. “You.” My lips trembled as the word left his mouth. “I’m not a specimen.” “I just want to know you.” I turned to him, wanting to ask him a million questions. I settled for one. “But I can’t know anything about you?” Dante leaned back in his chair. “My favorite author is Dante, obviously,” he said, his tone mocking me. “Though I’m partial to the Russians. I’m very fond of music. All kinds, really, though I especially enjoy Mussorgsky and Stravinsky or anything involving a violin. They’re a bit dark, no? I used to like opera, but I’ve mostly grown out of it. I have a low tolerance for hot climates. I’ve never enjoyed dessert, though I once loved cherries. My favorite color is red. I often take long walks in the woods to clear my head. As a result, I have a unique knowledge of the flora and fauna of North American. And,” he said, his eyes burning through me as I pretended to focus on our lab, “I remember everything everyone has ever told me. I consider it a special talent.” Overwhelmed by the sudden influx of information, I sat there gaping, unsure of how to respond. Dante frowned. “Did I leave something out?

Dar Fauna era convinsa, dintr-o indelungata experienta proprie, ca in primul rand oamenii nu stiu ce vor, ca in al doilea rand nu stiu cum sa obtina ceea ce vor si ca in al treilea rand nu stiu sa profite de ceea ce au.

Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and brush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock.

L'opinione corrente a proposito di queste malattie della terra si riflette nel fatto che le nostre cure sono ancora prevalentemente locali. Perciò quando il terreno perde fertilità usiamo un fertilizzante o, nel migliore dei casi, ne alteriamo la flora e la fauna, senza considerare che le sue specie selvatiche, poiché hanno formato quel particolare terreno, possono essere molto importanti per la sua salvaguardia. Si è scoperto di recente per esempio che un buon raccolto di tabacco dipende per qualche motivo sconosciuto dalla preparazione del terreno fatta dalle piante di senecio selvatico. Non ci rendiamo conto che simili legami di dipendenza possono essere estremamente comuni in natura.

The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as though plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man’s thoughts. —Louis Aragon

She knew the shapes of all the trees; still some seemed to dart here and there, moving with the moon. For a while she was so stiff she couldn't swallow, but on cue, the familiar songs of tree frogs and katydids filled the night. More comforting than three blind mice with a carving knife. The darkness held an odor of sweetness, the earthy breath of frogs and salamanders who'd made it through one more stinky-hot day. The marsh snuggled in closer with a low fog, and she slept.

When her lagoon opened before them, the delicate details of every mossy branch and brilliant leaf reflected in the clear dark water. Dragonflies and snowy egrets lifted briefly at his strange boat, then resettled gracefully on silent wings.

When we Westerners call people 'natives' we implicitly take the colour out of our perception of them. We see them as wild animals infesting the country in which we happen to come across them, as part of the local flora and fauna and not as men of like passions with ourselves. So long as we think of them as 'natives' we may exterminate them or, as is more likely to-day, domesticate them and honestly (perhaps not altogether mistakenly) believe that we are improving the breed, but we do not begin to understand them.

Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river's edge; around them eight hundred species of trees stood, more than are native to all of North America; and a thousand species of butterflies, 6 percent of the entire world fauna, waited for the dawn.About the orchids of that place we knew very little. About flies and beetles almost nothing, fungi nothing, most kinds of organisms nothing. Five thousand kinds of bacteria might be found in a pinch of soil, and about them we knew absolutely nothing. This was wilderness in the sixteenth-century sense, as it must have formed in the minds of the Portuguese explorers, its interior still largely unexplored and filled with strange, myth-engendering plants and animals. From such a place the pious naturalist would send long respectful letters to royal patrons about the wonders of the new world as testament to the glory of God. And I thought: there is still time to see this land in such a manner.

That individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other; that, however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent - is betrayed in the end also by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a definite fundamental scheme of possible philosophies. Under an invisible spell, they always revolve once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their critical or systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, one after the other - to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts. Their thinking is, in fact, far less a discovery than a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul, out of which those concepts grew originally: philosophizing is to this extent a kind of atavism of the highest order.

La naturaleza que nos rodea ha creado un mundo en el que poder crecer y evolucionar. En todos los lugares nos encontramos con elementos comunes: agua, tierra, flora, fauna. Pero quizás debamos nuestra existencia a aquellas fuerzas que no podemos ver, ni  medir… ni tampoco explicar.

Forgive me if my eyes see no more clearly than sea foam, please forgive that my form grows outward without license and never stops: monotonous is my song, my word is a shadow bird, fauna of stone and sea, the grief of a winter planet, Incorruptible. Forgive me this sequence of water, of rock, of foam, of the tide’s delirium: this is my loneliness: salt in sudden leaps against the walls of my secret being, in such a way that I am a part of winter, of the same flat expanse that repeats from bell to bell, in wave after wave, and from a silence like a woman’s hair, a silence of seaweed, a sunken song.

It is tempting to look upon England as a sort of musical Australia, an island culture inhabited by, and sustaining, its own insular fauna – musical kangaroos, koalas, and platypuses. That, however, would be very much to exaggerate England's musical isolation or independence. It is also a considerable exaggeration to view the English preference for thirds as something altogether alien or opposed to continental practice, as if only in remote geographical corners (and behind closed doors, among consenting adults) could harmonies unsanctioned by Pythagoras or the Musica enchiriadis be furtively enjoyed.

As much as it was like anything, magic was like a language. And like a language, textbooks and teachers treated it as an orderly system for the purposes of teaching it, but in reality it was complex and chaotic and organic. It obeyed rules only to the extent that it felt like it, and there were almost as many special cases and one-time variations as there were rules. These Exceptions were indicated by rows of asterisks and daggers and other more obscure typographical fauna which invited the reader to peruse the many footnotes that cluttered up the margins of magical reference books like Talmudic commentary.

Like its master, it was entirely devoid of hair, but was of a dark slate color and exceeding smooth and glossy. Its belly was white, and its legs shaded from the slate of its shoulders and hips to a vivid yellow at the feet. The feet themselves were heavily padded and nailless, which fact had also contributed to the noiselessness of their approach, and, in common with a multiplicity of legs, is a characteristic feature of the fauna of Mars. The highest type of man and one other animal, the only mammal existing on Mars, alone have well-formed nails, and there are absolutely no hoofed animals in existence there.

Harlow's results showed that a mother's reassuring gentle touch —what Harlow called "contact comfort"—is a more important factor in an infant's world than food. The journalist Deborah Blum, in her excellent biography of Harlow, Love at Goon Park, summarizes his initial findings: that for a baby primate, "food is sustenance but a good hug is life itself.

Imagination is nothing more than a memory transposed.

The only reason we see different color is because of a self-inflicted disease we call racism.

Thanks to suffering and madness, I have had a finer, richer life than any of you, and I wish to go to my death with dignity, as befits the great moment after which all dignity and majesty cease. Let my body be my ark and my death a long floating on the waves of eternity. A nothing amid nothingness. What defense have I against nothingness but this ark in which I have tried to gather everything that was dear to me, people, birds, animals, and plants, everything that I carry in my eye and in my heart, in the triple-decked ark of my body and soul. Like the pharaohs in the majestic peace of their tombs, I wanted to have all those things with me in death, I wanted everything to be as it was before; I wanted the birds to sing for me forever, I wanted to exchange Charon's bark for another, less desolate and less empty; I wanted to ennoble eternity's unconscionable void with the bitter herbs that spring from the heart of man, to ennoble the soundless emptiness of eternity with the cry of the cuckoo and the song of the lark. All I have done is to develop that bitter poetic metaphor, carry it with passionate logic to its ultimate consequence, which transforms sleep into waking (and the converse); lucidity into madness (and the converse); life into death, as though there were no borderline, and the converse; death into eternity, as if they were not one and the same thing. Thus my egoism is only the egoism of human existence, the egoism of life, counterweight to the egoism of death, and, appearances to the contrary, my consciousness resists nothingness with an egoism that has no equal, resists the outrage of death with the passionate metaphor of the wish to reunite the few people and the bit of love that made up my life. I have wanted and still want to depart this life with specimens of people, flora and fauna, to lodge them all in my heart as in an ark, to shut them up behind my eyelids when they close for the last time. I wanted to smuggle this pure abstraction into nothingness, to sneak it across the threshold of that other abstraction, so crushing in its immensity: the threshold of nothingness. I have therefore tried to condense this abstraction, to condense it by force of will, faith, intelligence, madness, and love (self-love), to condense it so drastically that its specific weight will be such as to life it like a balloon and carry it beyond the reach of darkness and oblivion. If nothing else survives, perhaps my material herbarium or my notes or my letters will live on, and what are they but condensed, materialized idea; materialized life: a paltry, pathetic human victory over immense, eternal, divine nothingness. Or perhaps--if all else is drowned in the great flood--my madness and my dream will remain like a northern light and a distant echo. Perhaps someone will see that light or hear that distant echo, the shadow of a sound that was once, and will grasp the meaning of that light, that echo. Perhaps it will be my son who will someday publish my notes and my herbarium of Pannonian plants (unfinished and incomplete, like all things human). But anything that survives death is a paltry, pathetic victory over the eternity of nothingness--a proof of man's greatness and Yahweh's mercy. Non omnis moriar.

If you like, you could call this the psychology of total equivalence, let’s say neuronics for short, and dismiss it as biological fantasy. However, I am convinced as we move back through geophysical time, so we reenter the amnionic corridor, and move back through spinal and archeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct ecological terrain, its own flora and fauna, as recognizable to anyone else as they would be to a traveller in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total reorientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as we reappear, we’ll be swept back helplessly in the floodtide like pieces of flotsam.

... neither the metaphor of ‘melting pot’ nor of ‘salad bowl’ can accurately explain Indian culture. My preferred metaphor is that of the Rain Forest. The ‘tropical rain forest’ characteristically has a number of layers, each with a variety of flora and fauna adapted for life in that particular layer. The layers include the uppermost ‘emergent’ layer that rises above to form the canopy of the forest, the ‘under-story’ and finally the ‘forest floor’, the foundational core. This emergent layer has its roots in the forest floor that is full of shrubs, vines and fungi... A ‘bird’s-eye view’ cannot reveal this rootedness, the underlying substratum, the under-stories and the forest floor. If the metaphor of ‘tropical rain forest’ is applied to the Indus Valley Civilization, the citadels, the rulers, and the rich merchants with their maritime wealth, the urban structure and its finesse are comparable with the ‘emergent canopy’. Yet the bulk of the demography was at the root – the substratum, from which the mature urban cities emerged... The nature of its religion, the cultural practices, cockfights and bull-vaulting visually represent the ‘under-story’ of the IVC.

If Darwin is right, Agassiz argued, then we should find not just one or a few missing links, but innumerable links shading almost imperceptibly from alleged ancestors to presumed descendants. Geologists, however, had found no such myriad of transitional forms leading to the Cambrian fauna. Instead, the stratigraphic column seemed to document the abrupt appearance of the earliest animals. Agassiz

Well, no, if we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us wouldn’t, even in this more politically correct age. For satisfying the claims of justice in this instance would not only disrupt the present and future, but also the past: wouldn’t the Mexicans then have to give it all back to the Spanish, and then the Spanish to the indigenous populations they decimated, and then those peoples to the flora and fauna they displaced after crossing the land bridge from Siberia thousands of years earlier? The argument is absurd, but only because it rejects any coexistence of contradictions in time or space: it thereby confirms Berlin’s claim that not all praiseworthy things are simultaneously possible. And that learning to live within that condition—let’s call it history—requires adaptation to incompatibles.

But life is fragile. Earth’s occasional encounters with large, wayward comets and asteroids, a formerly common event, wreaks intermittent havoc upon our ecosystem. A mere sixty-five million years ago (less than two percent of Earth’s past), a ten-trillion-ton asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula and obliterated more than seventy percent of Earth’s flora and fauna—including all the famous outsized dinosaurs. Extinction. This ecological catastrophe enabled our mammal ancestors to fill freshly vacant niches, rather than continue to serve as hors d’oeuvres for T. rex. One big-brained branch of these mammals, that which we call primates, evolved a genus and species (Homo sapiens) with sufficient intelligence to invent methods and tools of science—and to deduce the origin and evolution of the universe.

Desalojar el escenario de mis crímenes, ahora convertido en polvorín de una guerra civil. El golpe de Estado, milagrosamente, aniquila el olor de la carne podrida. Entre esos cuerpos veo al oso polar, el héroe de mi infancia, disecado, inmaculadamente blanco, arrojado a este enjambre de carne y peligrosa fauna. - Vamos de aquí, Julio ¿o acaso te queda algo por mostrame? - No, Amanda. Ya nada de esto me pertenece...

In 1973 the London Convention was replaced by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, known as CITES, which has 181 signatories. Comprised of three appendices that gauge the severity of threat to various species, CITES protects 35,000 species of plants and animals. Among them are nearly fifteen hundred birds, including Alfred Russel Wallace’s beloved King Bird of Paradise.

I’m not normally afraid of things, the way humans are. I’ve been shot hundreds of times, so many times I stopped keeping count, so many times the company stopped keeping count. I’ve been chewed on by hostile fauna, run over by heavy machinery, tortured by clients for amusement, memory purged, etc., etc. But the inside of my head had been my own for +33,000 hours and I was used to it now. I wanted to keep me the way I was.

Why, if evolution were a free for all, restrained only by selection for fitness, why did Australia not produce some of the bug-eyed monsters of science fiction? The only moderately unorthodox creation of that isolated island in a hundred million years are the kangaroos and wallabies; the rest of its fauna consists of rather poor replicas of more efficient placental types-vatiations on a limited number of archetypal themes.

Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!

There's a switch inside every one of us that I guess grew there as a necessary part of survival. How can you drag a fish up out of the river for your supper if you feel the yank of the hook in your own cheek? I get that part. We can't feel for everyone and everything all the time. We'd die of fear or sorrow a hundred times a day. The thing is, it's gotten so we flick the switch off like it's nothing. And, more often than not, we forget to turn it back on.

Scattered trees, never thick enough to be a forest, were everywhere. Shasta, who had lived all his life in an almost tree-less grassland, had never seen so many or so many kinds. If you had been there you would probably have known (he didn't) that he was seeing oaks, beeches, silver birches, rowans, and sweet chestnuts. Rabbits scurried away in every direction as they advanced, and presently they saw a whole herd of fallow deer making off among the trees.

Do you like flora and fauna? How about plants and animals? Because we have more of that beautiful crap than we know what to do with. Charmingly domesticated troops of monkeys swing freely throughout our orchid-laden property. You’re probably thinking that a lot of all-inclusive resorts have monkeys. True, but only one resort packs a monkey for each of their guests to take home. You’ll be showing off more than a tan to your friends, you’ll be showing off a gibbon.

To make a tarte of strawberyes," wrote Margaret Parker in 1551, "take and strayne theym with the yolkes of four eggs, and a little whyte breade grated, then season it up with suger and swete butter and so bake it." And Jess, who had spent the past year struggling with Kant's Critiques, now luxuriated in language so concrete. Tudor cookbooks did not theorize, nor did they provide separate ingredient lists, or scientific cooking times or temperatures. Recipes were called receipts, and tallied materials and techniques together. Art and alchemy were their themes, instinct and invention. The grandest performed occult transformations: flora into fauna, where, for example, cooks crushed blanched almonds and beat them with sugar, milk, and rose water into a paste to "cast Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast." Or flour into gold, gilding marchpane and festive tarts. Or mutton into venison, or fish to meat, or pig to fawn, one species prepared to stand in for another.

Stone Age ancestors spread from East Africa to the four corners of the earth, they changed the flora and fauna of every continent and island on which they settled. They drove to extinction all the other human species of the world, 90 per cent of the large animals of Australia, 75 per cent of the large mammals of America and about 50 per cent of all the large land mammals of the planet – and all before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

Rona soon picked out her own plot of land - one hundred eighty acres that stretched along the bottom of a rocky hill and only a stone's through from the shoreline. Quickly, much more quickly than natural for a man much less a woman - even one of Rona Blackburn's stature - a house appeared. She filled her new home with reminders of her previous one on the Aegean island she had loved so much: pastel seashells and a front door painted a deep cobalt blue - a color the yiayias always claimed had the power to repel evil. Then she set up her bed, made a pit for her fire, and erected two wooden tables. One table she kept bare. The other she covered in tinctures and glass jars of cut herbs and other fermented bits of flora and fauna. On this table, she kept a marble mortar and pestle, the leather sheath in which she wrapped her knives, and copper bowls - some for mixing dry ingredients, some for liquid, and a few small enough to bring to the mouth for sipping. And when the fire was stoked and the table was set, she placed a wooden sign - soon covered in a blanket of late December snow - outside that blue front door. It read one world: Witch.

Feeling the slight tremor of his fingers against her skin, Daisy was emboldened to remark, “I’ve never been attracted to tall men before. But you make me feel—” “If you don’t keep quiet,” he interrupted curtly, “I’m going to strangle you.” Daisy felt silent, listening to the rhythm of his breath as it turned deeper, less controlled. By contrast his fingers became more certain in their task, working along the row of pearls until her dress gaped open and the sleeves slipped from her shoulders. “Where is it?” he asked. “The key?” His tone was deadly. “Yes, Daisy. The key.” “It fell inside my corset. Which means… I’ll have to take that off too.” There was no reaction to the statement, no sound or movement. Daisy twisted to glance at Matthew. He seemed dazed. His eyes looked unnaturally blue against the flush on his face. She realized he was occupied with a savage inner battle to keep from touching her. Feeling hot and prickly with embarrassment, Daisy pulled her arms completely out of her sleeves. She worked the dress over her hips, wriggling out of the filmy white layers, letting them slide to the floor in a heap. Matthew stared at the discarded dress as if it were some kind of exotic fauna he had never seen before. Slowly his eyes returned to Daisy, and an incoherent protest came from his throat as she began to unhook her corset. She felt shy and wicked, undressing in front of him. But she was encouraged by the way he seemed unable to tear his gaze from each newly revealed inch of pale skin. When the last metal hook came apart, she tossed the web of lace and stays to the floor. All that remained over her breasts was a crumpled chemise. The key had dropped into her lap. Closing her fingers around the metal object, she risked a cautious glance at Matthew. His eyes were closed, his forehead scored with furrows of pained concentration. “This isn’t going to happen,” he said, more to himself than to her. Daisy leaned forward to tuck the key into his coat pocket. Gripping the hem of her chemise, she stripped it over her head. A tingling shock chased over her naked upper body. She was so nervous that her teeth had begun to chatter. “I just took my chemise off,” she said. “Don’t you want to look?” “No.” But his eyes had opened, and his gaze found her small, pink-tipped breasts, and the breath hissed through his clenched teeth. He sat without moving, staring at her as she untied his cravat and unbuttoned the layers of his waistcoat and shirt. She blushed everywhere but continued doggedly, rising to her knees to tug the coat from his shoulders. He moved like a dreamer, slowly pulling his arms from the coat sleeves and waistcoat. Daisy pushed his shirt open with awkward determination, her gaze drinking in the sight of his chest and torso. His skin gleamed like heavy satin, stretched taut over broad expanses of muscle. She touched the powerful vault of his ribs, trailing her fingertips to the rippled tautness of his midriff. Suddenly Matthew caught her hand, seemingly undecided whether to push it away or press it closer. Her fingers curled over his. She stared into his dilated blue eyes. “Matthew,” she whispered. “I’m here. I’m yours. I want to do everything you’ve ever imagined doing with me.” He stopped breathing. His will foundered and collapsed, and suddenly nothing mattered except the demands of a desire that had been denied too long. With a rough groan of surrender, he lifted her onto his lap.

But the Anthropocene isn’t a novel phenomenon of the last few centuries. Already tens of thousands of years ago, when our Stone Age ancestors spread from East Africa to the four corners of the earth, they changed the flora and fauna of every continent and island on which they settled. They drove to extinction all the other human species of the world, 90 per cent of the large animals of Australia, 75 per cent of the large mammals of America and about 50 per cent of all the large land mammals of the planet – and all before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

Runach took the book in hand and went to look for that Bruadarian lass, who was likely having a conversation with the flora and fauna of his grandfather's garden... He just hadn't expected her to be singing. It wasn't loud singing, though he could hear it once he'd wandered the garden long enough to catch sight of her, standing beneath a flowering linden tree, holding a blossom in her hand. Runach came to a skidding halt and gaped at her. Very well, so he had ceased to think of her as plain directly after Gobhann, and he had been struggling to come up with a worthy adjective ever since. He supposed he might spend the rest of his life trying, and never manage it. It was difficult to describe a dream. He had to sit down on the first bench he found, because he couldn't stand any longer. He wondered if the day would come where she ceased to surprise him with the things she did. Her song was nothing he had ever heard before, but for some reason it seemed familiar in a way he couldn't divine. It was enough for the moment to simply sit there and watch as she and the tree--and several of the flowers, it had to be said--engaged in an ethereal bit of music making. It was truthfully the most beautiful thing he had ever heard, and that was saying something, because the musicians who graced his grandfather's hall were unequalled in any Elvish hall he'd ever visited. And then Runach realized why what she was doing sounded so familiar. She was singing in Fadaire. He grasped for the rapidly disappearing shreds of anything resembling coherent thought, but it was useless. All he could do was sit on that very cold bench and listen to a woman who had hardly set foot past her place of incarceration, sing a song in his mother's native tongue, that would have brought any elf in the vicinity to tears if they had heard it. He knew because it was nigh onto bringing him to that place in spite of his sorry, jaded self.

The chronicles of Australian fauna are amazingly full of stories such as this – of animals that are there one moment and gone the next. A more recent casualty of the phenomenon was a frog called Rheobatrachus silus, which was around for such a short time that it didn’t even manage to attract an informal name. What was extraordinary about R. silus (and it almost goes without saying that there would be something) was that it gave birth to live young through its mouth – something never before seen in nature inside Australia or out. It was discovered by biologists in 1973 and by 1981 it had disappeared. It is listed as ‘probably extinct’. My

Las mentes de Alexander y Nadia se expandieron de nuevo y percibieron las conexiones entre los seres, el universo entero entrelazado por corrientes de energía, por una red exquisita, fina como seda, fuerte como acero. Entendieron que nada existe aislado; cada cosa que ocurre, desde un pensamiento hasta un huracán, afecta a lo demás. Sintieron la tierra palpitante y viva, un gran organismo acunando en su regazo la flora y la fauna, los montes, los ríos, el viento de las llanuras, la lava de los volcanes las nieves eternas de las más altas montañas. Y esa madre planeta es parte de otros organismos mayores, unida a los infinitos astros del inmenso firmamento.

Lake Natron resided in northern Tanzania near an active volcano known as Ol Doinyo Lengai. It was part of the reason the lake had such unique characteristics. The mud had a curious dark grey color over where Jack had been set up for observation, and he noted that there was now an odd-looking mound of it to the right of one of the flamingo’s nests. He zoomed in further and further, peering at it, and then realized what he was actually seeing. The dragon had crouched down beside the nests and blended into the mud. From snout to tail, Jack calculated it had to be twelve to fourteen feet long. Its wings were folded against its back, which had small spines running down the length to a spiky tail. It had a fin with three prongs along the base of the skull and webbed feet tipped with sharp black talons. He estimated the dragon was about the size of a large hyena. It peered up at its prey with beady red eyes, its black forked tongue darting out every few seconds. Its shoulder muscles bunched and its hind legs tensed. Then it pounced. The dark grey dragon leapt onto one of flamingoes atop its nest and seized it by the throat. The bird squawked in distress and immediately beat its wings, trying to free itself. The others around them took to the skies in panic. The dragon slammed it into the mud and closed its jaws around the animal’s throat, blood spilling everywhere. The flamingo yelped out its last breaths and then finally stilled. The dragon dropped the limp carcass and sniffed the eggs before beginning to swallow them whole one at a time. “Holy shit,” Jack muttered. “Have we got a visual?” “Oh, yeah. Based on the size, the natives and the conservationists were right to be concerned. It can probably wipe out a serious number of wildlife in a short amount of time based on what I’m seeing. There’s only a handful of fauna that can survive in these conditions and it could make mincemeat out of them.” “Alright, so what’s the plan?” “They told me it’s very agile, which is why their attempts to capture it haven’t worked. I’m going to see if it responds to any of the usual stimuli. So far, they said it doesn’t appear to be aggressive.” “Copy that. Be careful, cowboy.” “Ten-four.” Jack glanced down at his utility belt and opened the pocket on his left side, withdrawing a thin silver whistle. He put it to his lips and blew for several seconds. Much like a dog whistle, Jack couldn’t hear anything. But the dragon’s head creaked around and those beady red eyes locked onto him. Jack lowered the whistle and licked his dry lips. “If I were in a movie, this would be the part where I said, ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’” The dragon roared, its grey wings extending out from its body, and then flew straight at him.

We are often appalled at the tragic prevalence of wildlife poaching in Africa, where only a resolute if underfunded band of park guards works to prevent the total elimination of rhino and elephant.* But 70 years ago things were even more desperate in Europe, for Europe had lost its megafauna, and even its wisent had been driven into extinction in the wild. Its largest surviving wild creatures were antelope-sized, and even some of them were being exterminated by the most determined poaching. The lessons of history should make the world more helpful to the dozens of unsung African Renzo Videsotts working today. With a little help, they may succeed in conserving some of Africa’s fauna.

Whole NNE cults and stelliform subcults Lenz reports as existing around belief systems about the metaphysics of the Concavity and annular fusion and B.S.-1950s-B-cartridge-type-radiation-affected fauna and overfertilization and verdant forests with periodic oasises of purportaged desert and whatever east of the former Montpelier VT area of where the annulated Shawshine River feeds the Charles and tints it the exact same tint of blue as the blue on boxes of Hefty SteelSaks and the ideas of ravacious herds of feral domesticated housepets and oversized insects not only taking over the abandoned homes of relocated Americans but actually setting up house and keeping them in model repair and impressive equity, allegedly, and the idea of infants the size of prehistoric beasts roaming the overfertilized east Concavity quadrants, leaving enormous scat-piles and keening for the abortive parents who’d left or lost them in the general geopolitical shuffle of mass migration and really fast packing, or, as some of your more Limbaugh-era-type cultists sharingly believe, originating from abortions hastily disposed of in barrels in ditches that got breached and mixed ghastly contents with other barrels that reanimated the abortive feti and brought them to a kind of repelsive oversized B-cartridge life thundering around due north of where yrstruly and Green strolled through the urban grid.

A Party for New Year (for Lily and Maisie, the ladies what lunch.) Dear Lily, I have bought something frilly, to wear on New Year’s Eve. You may think it sounds rather silly, and, what I tell you, you will never believe. I met a woman in Primark, I know, not my normal shop. Just heard so much about it inside I had to pop. Well, the top I purchased, sparkles. The frills upon it abound. This woman I met in the changing room. On me, she said it looked sound. It's very, very silver you know. A little bit like Lametta. Oh Lily, I feel quite aglow. On no one could it look any better. Dear Maisie, Things are looking a bit hazy. A silver top, for New Year. Are you really, really that crazy? My word, you batty old dear. I'm wearing my old faithful. The black dress, with the gold trim. It's not like we’re doing anything special. In fact proceedings sound quite grim. Sitting on your old sofa With a Baileys, if I'm lucky. Watching the same old things on the box. I'm not excited Ducky. I want to be in the city and feel the atmosphere. It really is a pity that you want to stay right here. Dear Lily. Now you are being silly. What about your knees? Standing about, feeling chilly, and moaning you're going to freeze. Much better to stay indoors and watch a music show. We'll get the bongs at midnight. This you very well know. I don't have any Baileys. You drank it Christmas Day. But I found some cooking sherry. I want that out of the way. I even have some nibbles, so come on, what do you say? We'll have us a little party. Bring your nightie and then you can stay. Dear Maisie, Do you remember Daisy? Her with the wart on her ear. She thinks she'd like to join us to celebrate New Year. Do we really want her with us? She's quite a moaning Minnie. She always makes such a fuss. I'd hoped she'd celebrate with Winnie. I think I will come over Lil'. I'll even bring the wine. We really should start taking turns. Next year, you can come to mine. We'll have a great time, you and me. Go out in the cold? No fear. We'll be fine indoors, just you see. Friends together, celebrating New Year.

Birds are the most common,” Vosch says. He’s absently running his finger over the button marked EXECUTE. “Owls. During the initial phase, when we were inserting ourselves into you, we often used the screen memory of an owl to hide the fact from the expectant mother.” “I hate birds,” I whisper. Vosch smiles. “The most useful of this planet’s indigenous fauna. Diverse. Considered benign, for the most part. So ubiquitous they’re practically invisible. Did you know they’re descended from the dinosaurs? There’s a very satisfying irony in that. The dinosaurs made way for you, and now, with the help of their descendants, you will make way for us.” “No one helped me!” I screech, cutting off the lecture. “I did it all myself!

A tender fan of white threads surfaced up through the dirt, speaking in a hundred tiny whispers. 'It's true. My god, your ignorance about the flora and fauna of the Amazon -- staggering. Do you know there are four thousand species of trees alone that none of your scientists have even named, much less analyzed? You have any idea how many fungi? I heard you finally 'found' a few new species of electric eels, that cobalt-blue tarantula, a couple of new river dolphins. I think also a tree that's a hundred feet taller than the tallest tree you thought you knew of. At what point do you rethink your whole idea that these are 'discoveries?' How does that word even have any meaning for you? Something exists just because you finally 'found' it? You 'discovered' it?

Life, in short, just wants to be. But—and here’s an interesting point—for the most part it doesn’t want to be much. This is perhaps a little odd because life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions. If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long. Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5-billion-year-old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, “and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history.” Fortunately, that moment hasn’t happened, but the chances are good that it will. I don’t wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and die remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn’t terribly ambitious.

The Foundry Man All day, every day; a head that pounds to the rhythm of beating hammers. Feet, numbed from the vibrations of heavy machinery, and skin that glows crimson from the blistering heat of the furnace. Sweat glistens on his furrowed brow, sweat that runs in rivulets to eyes already sore from black, putrid dust. This is the lot of the foundry man. Not for him fresh air, green fields, or the sun on his back. He has a heart of gold, strength of steel. He is a man of iron.

En el polo opuesto de la discusión, la frase -derecho a la vida- constituye un ejemplo claro de expresión altisonante concebida para impresionar más que para aclarar las cosas. Ni hoy ni nunca ha existido en ningún país de la tierra el derecho a la vida. Criamos animales domésticos para luego darles muerte, destruimos los bosques, contaminamos ríos y lagos hasta causar la muerte de toda la fauna piscícola, cazamos venados por deporte, leopardos por la piel y ballenas para preparar comida para los perros, atrapamos a los delfines, boqueantes y semiasfixiados, con grandes redes del tipo utilizado para la pesca del atún, y senteciamos a muerte a los perros cachorros para -equilibrar la población-. Todos estos animales y vegetales están tan vivos como nosotros. Lo que muchas sociedades humanas protegen no es la vida, sino la vida el hombre, y aún así desencadenamos guerras con medios -modernos- que causan estragos a la población civil y que suponen un tributo tan escandaloso que muchos de nosotros ni siquiera nos atrevemos a entrar en su consideración.

Parerea lui Iosif Maria: periculoasa intr-un stabiliment. Prea mult caracter. Nu joaca asa cum ii canti. Poate sa strice totul. Atentie daca se indragosteste. Fara indoiala ca bacanul ar fi dat-o afara de la Bear Flag. Nu poti sa te increzi decat in egoisti de teapa ta. Poti sa sti intotdeauna ce va face un egoist, in timp ce nu sti la ce te poti astepta de la o fiinta generoasa. Singura victima intr-adevar sigura este egoistul. Cu el n-ai niciodata neplaceri. Fauna era pe cale sa comita o greseala. Iosif Maria o evalua pe Suzy ca pe o masina de ocazie. Silueta frumoasa, glezne si picioare atragatoare. Draguta la chip, daca era fericita. Starea sufleteasca i se citea pe fata. O tarfa adevarata poarta o masca, este aceeasi pentru toata lumea, adica placuta, si nu-ti mai amintesti de ea a doua zi dimineata. Suzy nu era o fata pe care s-o uiti. Riscai cu ea prea mult. Suzy iubea sau nu iubea oamenii, ceea ce era periculos in sine. [...] Iar pe deasupra, ochii plini de indiferenta nu erau din aceia neinsufletiti, in care nu poti sa te increzi. Nu era smechera si ar fi putut sa lupte chiar impotriva lui Jack Dempsey. Una peste alta, Iosif Maria ar fi doborat-o pe Suzy in mai putin de un minut. Era tocmai genul de fata care s-ar fi putut indragosti de un baiat fara sa se intereseze ce cont are la banca. Genul care creeaza o gramada de necazuri fara a aduce nimic in schimb. Printr-o serie de trasaturi semana cu Doc. Bacanul isi zise ca o va avertiza pe Fauna inca o data. O asemenea fata in stabiliment te duce la faliment.

In theory, toppings can include almost anything, but 95 percent of the ramen you consume in Japan will be topped with chashu, Chinese-style roasted pork. In a perfect world, that means luscious slices of marinated belly or shoulder, carefully basted over a low temperature until the fat has rendered and the meat collapses with a hard stare. Beyond the pork, the only other sure bet in a bowl of ramen is negi, thinly sliced green onion, little islands of allium sting in a sea of richness. Pickled bamboo shoots (menma), sheets of nori, bean sprouts, fish cake, raw garlic, and soy-soaked eggs are common constituents, but of course there is a whole world of outlier ingredients that make it into more esoteric bowls, which we'll get into later. While shape and size will vary depending on region and style, ramen noodles all share one thing in common: alkaline salts. Called kansui in Japanese, alkaline salts are what give the noodles a yellow tint and allow them to stand up to the blistering heat of the soup without degrading into a gummy mass. In fact, in the sprawling ecosystem of noodle soups, it may be the alkaline noodle alone that unites the ramen universe: "If it doesn't have kansui, it's not ramen," Kamimura says. Noodles and toppings are paramount in the ramen formula, but the broth is undoubtedly the soul of the bowl, there to unite the disparate tastes and textures at work in the dish. This is where a ramen chef makes his name. Broth can be made from an encyclopedia of flora and fauna: chicken, pork, fish, mushrooms, root vegetables, herbs, spices. Ramen broth isn't about nuance; it's about impact, which is why making most soup involves high heat, long cooking times, and giant heaps of chicken bones, pork bones, or both. Tare is the flavor base that anchors each bowl, that special potion- usually just an ounce or two of concentrated liquid- that bends ramen into one camp or another. In Sapporo, tare is made with miso. In Tokyo, soy sauce takes the lead. At enterprising ramen joints, you'll find tare made with up to two dozen ingredients, an apothecary's stash of dried fish and fungus and esoteric add-ons. The objective of tare is essentially the core objective of Japanese food itself: to pack as much umami as possible into every bite.

Land and Sea The brilliant colors are the first thing that strike a visitor to the Greek Isles. From the stunning azure waters and blindingly white houses to the deep green-black of cypresses and the sky-blue domes of a thousand churches, saturated hues dominate the landscape. A strong, constant sun brings out all of nature’s colors with great intensity. Basking in sunshine, the Greek Isles enjoy a year-round temperate climate. Lemons grow to the size of grapefruits and grapes hang in heavy clusters from the vines of arbors that shade tables outside the tavernas. The silver leaves of olive trees shiver in the least sea breezes. The Greek Isles boast some of the most spectacular and diverse geography on Earth. From natural hot springs to arcs of soft-sand beaches and secret valleys, the scenery is characterized by dramatic beauty. Volcanic formations send craggy cliffsides plummeting to the sea, cause lone rock formations to emerge from blue waters, and carve beaches of black pebbles. In the Valley of the Butterflies on Rhodes, thousands of radiant winged creatures blanket the sky in summer. Crete’s Samaria Gorge is the longest in Europe, a magnificent natural wonder rife with local flora and fauna. Corfu bursts with lush greenery and wildflowers, nurtured by heavy rainfall and a sultry sun. The mountain ranges, gorges, and riverbeds on Andros recall the mainland more than the islands. Both golden beaches and rocky countrysides make Mykonos distinctive. Around Mount Olympus, in central Cyprus, timeless villages emerge from the morning mist of craggy peaks and scrub vegetation. On Evia and Ikaria, natural hot springs draw those seeking the therapeutic power of healing waters. Caves abound in the Greek Isles; there are some three thousand on Crete alone. The Minoans gathered to worship their gods in the shallow caves that pepper the remotest hilltops and mountain ranges. A cave near the town of Amnissos, a shrine to Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, once revealed a treasure trove of small idols dedicated to her. Some caves were later transformed into monasteries. On the islands of Halki and Cyprus, wall paintings on the interiors of such natural monasteries survive from the Middle Ages. Above ground, trees and other flora abound on the islands in a stunning variety. ON Crete, a veritable forest of palm trees shades the beaches at Vai and Preveli, while the high, desolate plateaus of the interior gleam in the sunlight. Forest meets sea on the island of Poros, and on Thasos, many species of pine coexist. Cedars, cypress, oak, and chestnut trees blanket the mountainous interiors of Crete, Cyprus, and other large islands. Rhodes overflows with wildflowers during the summer months. Even a single island can be home to disparate natural wonders. Amorgos’ steep, rocky coastline gives way to tranquil bays. The scenery of Crete--the largest of the Greek Isles--ranges from majestic mountains and barren plateaus to expansive coves, fertile valleys, and wooded thickets.

In 1995, the gray wolf was reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park after a seventy-year hiatus. Scientists expected an ecological ripple effect, but the size and scope of the trophic cascade took them by surprise.7 Wolves are predators that kill certain species of animals, but they indirectly give life to others. When the wolves reentered the ecological equation, it radically changed the behavioral patterns of other wildlife. As the wolves began killing coyotes, the rabbit and mouse populations increased, thereby attracting more hawks, weasels, foxes, and badgers. In the absence of predators, deer had overpopulated the park and overgrazed parts of Yellowstone. Their new traffic patterns, however, allowed the flora and fauna to regenerate. The berries on those regenerated shrubs caused a spike in the bear population. In six years’ time, the trees in overgrazed parts of the park had quintupled in height. Bare valleys were reforested with aspen, willow, and cottonwood trees. And as soon as that happened, songbirds started nesting in the trees. Then beavers started chewing them down. Beavers are ecosystem engineers, building dams that create natural habitats for otters, muskrats, and ducks, as well as fish, reptiles, and amphibians. One last ripple effect. The wolves even changed the behavior of rivers—they meandered less because of less soil erosion. The channels narrowed and pools formed as the regenerated forests stabilized the riverbanks. My point? We need wolves! When you take the wolf out of the equation, there are unintended consequences. In the absence of danger, a sheep remains a sheep. And the same is true of men. The way we play the man is by overcoming overwhelming obstacles, by meeting daunting challenges. We may fear the wolf, but we also crave it. It’s what we want. It’s what we need. Picture a cage fight between a sheep and a wolf. The sheep doesn’t stand a chance, right? Unless there is a Shepherd. And I wonder if that’s why we play it safe instead of playing the man—we don’t trust the Shepherd. Playing the man starts there! Ecologists recently coined a wonderful new word. Invented in 2011, rewilding has a multiplicity of meanings. It’s resisting the urge to control nature. It’s the restoration of wilderness. It’s the reintroduction of animals back into their natural habitat. It’s an ecological term, but rewilding has spiritual implications. As I look at the Gospels, rewilding seems to be a subplot. The Pharisees were so civilized—too civilized. Their religion was nothing more than a stage play. They were wolves in sheep’s clothing.8 But Jesus taught a very different brand of spirituality. “Foxes have dens and birds have nests,” said Jesus, “but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”9 So Jesus spent the better part of three years camping, fishing, and hiking with His disciples. It seems to me Jesus was rewilding them. Jesus didn’t just teach them how to be fishers of men. Jesus taught them how to play the man! That was my goal with the Year of Discipleship,