National Geographic Nature Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to National Geographic Nature. Here they are! All 28 of them:

When you ate her tuna casserole, you didn’t talk or flip through a National Geographic. Your eyes and ears stayed inside your mouth. Your whole world kept inside your mouth, feeling and careful for the little balled-up tinfoils Irene Casey would hide in the tuna parts. A side effect of eating slow was, you naturally, genuinely tasted, and the food tasted better. Could be other ladies were better cooks, but you’d never notice.
Chuck Palahniuk (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey)
what is the expression which the age demands? the age demands no expression whatever. we have seen photographs of bereaved asian mothers. we are not interested in the agony of your fumbled organs. there is nothing you can show on your face that can match the horror of this time. do not even try. you will only hold yourself up to the scorn of those who have felt things deeply. we have seen newsreels of humans in the extremities of pain and dislocation. you are playing to people who have experienced a catastrophe. this should make you very quiet. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. everyone knows you are in pain. you cannot tell the audience everything you know about love in every line of love you speak. step aside and they will know what you know because you know it already. you have nothing to teach them. you are not more beautiful than they are. you are not wiser. do not shout at them. do not force a dry entry. that is bad sex. if you show the lines of your genitals, then deliver what you promise. and remember that people do not really want an acrobat in bed. what is our need? to be close to the natural man, to be close to the natural woman. do not pretend that you are a beloved singer with a vast loyal audience which has followed the ups and downs of your life to this very moment. the bombs, flame-throwers, and all the shit have destroyed more than just the trees and villages. they have also destroyed the stage. did you think that your profession would escape the general destruction? there is no more stage. there are no more footlights. you are among the people. then be modest. speak the words, convey the data, step aside. be by yourself. be in your own room. do not put yourself on. do not act out words. never act out words. never try to leave the floor when you talk about flying. never close your eyes and jerk your head to one side when you talk about death. do not fix your burning eyes on me when you speak about love. if you want to impress me when you speak about love put your hand in your pocket or under your dress and play with yourself. if ambition and the hunger for applause have driven you to speak about love you should learn how to do it without disgracing yourself or the material. this is an interior landscape. it is inside. it is private. respect the privacy of the material. these pieces were written in silence. the courage of the play is to speak them. the discipline of the play is not to violate them. let the audience feel your love of privacy even though there is no privacy. be good whores. the poem is not a slogan. it cannot advertise you. it cannot promote your reputation for sensitivity. you are students of discipline. do not act out the words. the words die when you act them out, they wither, and we are left with nothing but your ambition. the poem is nothing but information. it is the constitution of the inner country. if you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. you are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. think of the words as science, not as art. they are a report. you are speaking before a meeting of the explorers' club of the national geographic society. these people know all the risks of mountain climbing. they honour you by taking this for granted. if you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. do not work the audience for gasps ans sighs. if you are worthy of gasps and sighs it will not be from your appreciation of the event but from theirs. it will be in the statistics and not the trembling of the voice or the cutting of the air with your hands. it will be in the data and the quiet organization of your presence. avoid the flourish. do not be afraid to be weak. do not be ashamed to be tired. you look good when you're tired. you look like you could go on forever. now come into my arms. you are the image of my beauty.
Leonard Cohen (Death of a Lady's Man)
A glance at National Geographic shows that even the strangest acts in our own culture do not exhaust what our species is capable of. If anything goes, one might think, then perhaps we are Silly Putty, or unconstrained agents, after all.
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor. In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard—business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers—quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do they think of us? Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine other perspectives.
Peter Hessler (Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China)
Once again I draw your attention to the difficulties India has had to encounter and her struggle to overcome them. Her problem was the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely, one country made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the advantage of the strength of the many as well as the strength of the one. India, on the contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one, has all along suffered from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden easily; but diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and pushed with all force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was not her own creation; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning of her history. In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost exterminating the original population. Even in the present age this spirit of extermination is making itself manifest, in the inhospitable shutting out of aliens, by those who themselves were aliens in the lands they now occupy. But India tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of toleration has acted all through her history. Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of toleration. For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism. India
Rabindranath Tagore (Nationalism)
It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map. My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the map-maker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual. Furthermore, this ideological interest is not openly expressed in the way a mapmaker's technical interest is obvious ("This is a Mercator projection for long-range navigation-for short-range, you'd better use a different projection"). No, it is presented as if all readers of history had a common interest which historians serve to the best of their ability. This is not intentional deception; the historian has been trained in a society in which education and knowledge are put forward as technical problems of excellence and not as tools for contending social classes, races, nations. To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly. The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)-the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress-is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they-the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court-represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a "national interest" represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
The only violence God sanctioned in the OT was for nationalistic purposes. That’s because nations require violence. To exist, they need criminal laws, warfare policies, and armed men to enforce them. By their nature, they have order to maintain, territory to defend, national sovereignty to preserve, and history to control. But transnational, interethnic, nongovernmental, geographically dispersed organizations (like the church) do not.
Matthew Curtis Fleischer (The Old Testament Case for Nonviolence)
A third idea: An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind. Cognitive science has undermined the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine in another way. People can be forgiven for scoffing at the suggestion that human behavior is “in the genes” or “a product of evolution” in the senses familiar from the animal world. Human acts are not selected from a repertoire of knee-jerk reactions like a fish attacking a red spot or a hen sitting on eggs. Instead, people may worship goddesses, auction kitsch on the Internet, play air guitar, fast to atone for past sins, build forts out of lawn chairs, and so on, seemingly without limit. A glance at National Geographic shows that even the strangest acts in our own culture do not exhaust what our species is capable of. If anything goes, one might think, then perhaps we are Silly Putty, or unconstrained agents, after all.
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
With our powerful founding story, our unusual reverence for our Constitution, our geographic isolation, and our two centuries of relative economic success, modern Americans have long been convinced that liberal democracy, once achieved, was impossible to reverse. The founders themselves were not so certain: their beloved classical authors taught them that history was circular, that human nature was flawed, and that special measures were needed to precent democracy from sliding back into tyranny. But American history, to most modern Americans, does not feel circular. On the contrary, it is often told as a tale of progress, forward and upward, with the Civil War as a blip in the middle. Cultural despair does not come easily to a nation that believed in the Horatio Alger myth and Manifest Destiny. Pessimism is an alien sentiment in a state whose founding documents, the embodiment of the Enlightenment, contain one of the most optimistic views of the possibilities of human government ever written.
Anne Applebaum (Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism)
Africa’s coastline? great beaches, really, really lovely beaches, but terrible natural harbours. Rivers? Amazing rivers, but most of them are rubbish for actually transporting anything, given that every few miles you go over a waterfall. These are just two in a long list of problems which help explain why Africa isn’t technologically or politically as successful as Western Europe or North America. There are lots of places that are unsuccessful, but few have been as unsuccessful as Africa, and that despite having a head start as the place where Homo sapiens originated about 200,000 years ago. As that most lucid of writers, Jared Diamond, put it in a brilliant National Geographic article in 2005, ‘It’s the opposite of what one would expect from the runner first off the block.’ However, the first runners became separated from everyone else by the Sahara Desert and the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Almost the entire continent developed in isolation from the Eurasian land mass, where ideas and technology were exchanged from east to west, and west to east, but not north to south.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
Overtaken by demographic transformation and two generations of socio-geographic mobility, France’s once-seamless history seemed set to disappear from national memory altogether. The anxiety of loss had two effects. One was an increase in the range of the official patrimoine, the publicly espoused body of monuments and artifacts stamped ‘heritage’ by the authority of the state. In 1988, at the behest of Mitterrand’s Culture Minister Jack Lang, the list of officially protected items in the patrimoine culturel of “France—previously restricted to UNESCO-style heirlooms such as the Pont du Gard near Nîmes, or Philip the Bold’s ramparts at Aigues-Mortes—was dramatically enlarged. It is revealing of the approach taken by Lang and his successors that among France’s new ‘heritage sites’ was the crumbling façade of the Hôtel du Nord on Paris’s Quai de Jemappes: an avowedly nostalgic homage to Marcel Carné’s 1938 film classic of that name. But Carné shot that movie entirely in a studio. So the preservation of a building (or the façade of a building) which never even appeared in the film could be seen—according to taste—either as a subtle French exercise in post-modern irony, or else as symptomatic of the unavoidably bogus nature of any memory when subjected thus to official taxidermy.
Tony Judt (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945)
L'OVNI allemand Horten Wing.   Northrop Grumman Corporation, le Musée de l’Aviation et de l’Espace de San Diego et la chaîne National Geographic ont collaboré à l’élaboration grandeur nature de l’avion
Jean-Maximillien De La Croix de Lafayette (OVNIs et extraterrestres : Transcriptions des réunions entre les États-Unis et les Extraterrestres en 1947 et 1948)
An article in this month’s National Geographic magazine quotes a scientist referring to the “undistractibility” of these animals on their journeys. “An arctic tern on its way from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, for instance, will ignore a nice smelly herring offered from a bird-watcher’s boat in Monterey Bay. Local gulls will dive voraciously for such handouts, while the tern flies on. Why?” The article’s author, David Quammen, attempts an answer, saying “the arctic tern resists distraction because it is driven at that moment by an instinctive sense of something we humans find admirable: larger purpose.” In the same article, biologist Hugh Dingle notes that these migratory patterns reveal five shared characteristics: the journeys take the animals outside their natural habitat; they follow a straight path and do not zigzag; they involve advance preparation, such as overfeeding; they require careful allocations of energy; and finally, “migrating animals maintain a fervid attentiveness to the greater mission, which keeps them undistracted by temptations and undeterred by challenges that would turn other animals aside.” In other words, they are pilgrims with a purpose. In the case of the arctic tern, whose journey is 28,000 miles, “it senses it can eat later.” It can rest later. It can mate later. Its implacable focus is the journey; its singular intent is arrival. Elephants, snakes, sea snakes, sea turtles, myriad species of birds, butterflies, whales, dolphins, bison, bees, insects, antelopes, wildebeests, eels, great white sharks, tree frogs, dragon flies, crabs, Pacific blue tuna, bats, and even microorganisms – all of them have distinct migratory patterns, and all of them congregate in a special place, even if, as individuals, they have never been there before. -Hamza Yusuf on the Hajj of Community
Hamza Yusuf
Aritra points out his window as we pass a turnoff. “Two kilometers up that road a man was killed by an elephant. A few days ago. Three people were working on the roadway. They ran when they saw the elephant, and one man was separated, and the elephant followed him.” This is hard for me to imagine. I grew up with Babar and National Geographic. Elephants were gentle and slow-moving. They wore spats and bright green suits. They were never something to fear. This has created a minor disconnect between myself and my hosts.
Mary Roach (Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law)
Michael Halahan is a student that wants to have a successful career. He loves a close-knit family and wishes to find an active faith community. While he participated in a foreign language club during high school, Michael also played tennis and golf. Today, he enjoys reading National Geographic pieces about history and nature. Michael Halahan also occasionally reads fictional novels by authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy.
Michael Halahan
From Alan Thein Duening: Picture North America from space. Look at the upper left and start an imaginary line on the rugged coast of southern Alaska. Climb the ridges that encircle Prince William Sound. Cross the snowy teeth of the Chugach Mountains and descend through kettle-pond country to the feet of the towering Alaska Range. Rise again to the bitter heights and turning southeast along the crest, clip the corner of the Yukon Territory. Enter British Columbia and veer east through its folding north. Turn your line south when you reach the Continental Divide in the Rocky Mountains. Follow the divide down the thousand-mile spine of British Columbia, across Montana, along the buttressed ridges of the Idaho border and into Wyoming as far as Jackson Hole. There, leave the divide and turn westward toward the coast. Following the swells and benches that limit the Columbia Basin, dip southward into Utah and Nevada, then northward again around the high desert of central Oregon. When you approach the Cascade Mountains, veer southwest through the tangled topography of northern California to the crest of the Coast Range. Just north of San Francisco Bay, descend to the shores of the Pacific. The line you have drawn is an unfamiliar one. You won’t find it on maps. But it shows a geographical unit more real, in ecological sense, than any of the lines governments draw. You have drawn a biological region, a bioregion. Specifically, you have outlines the watersheds of rivers flowing into the Pacific Ocean through North America’s temperate rain forest zone with a fifteen-hundred-mile belt of rain forests along the coast. The unity of this diverse bioregion is the movement of its water; every ounce of moisture that the ocean throws into the sky and the sky hurls down on the land inside this region’s borders tumbles toward the rain forest coast. If it does not evaporate or get trapped in underground aquifers along the way, water will reach that dripping shoreline through one of several hundred swift, cold rivers. Most likely, it will travel through the Columbia or the Fraser rivers, home to the Earth’s greatest population of migrating salmon. This place, defined by water running to woodlands, has no perfect name. You can call it Rain Forest Province, the North Pacific Slope, or Cascadia… Natural units of place such as this have always mattered more to people than has humanity in general or the planet in its entirety. Indeed, history is unequivocal; people will sacrifice for villages, homelands, or nations, even giving their lives. But humans seem unwilling to sacrifice for their planet, despite the fact that it is now suffering proportionately greater losses from social decay and environmental destruction than most countries at war.
David Landis Barnhill (At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place: A Multicultural Anthology)
I had learned about tigers from a National Geographic documentary that had triggered this whole bait idea, from a channel dedicated to MoFos’ reverence of the natural world.
Kira Jane Buxton (Hollow Kingdom (Hollow Kingdom #1))
A scientific frontier, as defined in 1907 by the former viceroy, George Curzon, was “a Frontier which unites natural and strategical strength.”67 The period term “scientific” reflected a process of merging precise geographical information with military or political strategy, and revealed the development of geopolitics as an analytic frame derived from the premise that geography was a determining factor in the success or failure of states. Frontiers were “the razor’s edge” upon which the “life or death” of nations rested; their strategic aspects could shift alongside the geopolitical fluctuations of imperial politics.
Kyle J. Gardner (The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846–1962)
In The 33 Strategies of War one of the strategies Robert Greene tackles is Defeat Them in Detail: The Divide-And-Conquer Strategy "Never be intimidated by your enemy's appearance. Instead, look at the parts that make up the whole. By separating the parts, sowing dissension and division, you can bring down even the most formidable foe. When you are facing troubles or enemies, turn a large problem into small, eminently defeatable parts." Most of us have been captivated by the beauty and often gruesome nature of big cats like lions catching their prey in the wild. These hunters are so skilled that they have evolved strategies to overcome prey that is sometimes significantly larger than themselves and outnumbers the hunters many times over. "They hunt water buffalo by stampeding them into the water where they can attack and kill the young or weak members of the herd. After the initial stampede, the lions herd the buffalo through the water and relentlessly pursue them for hours at a time " according to National Geographics. Despite appearing extreme, given the current ruling party's track record, it is difficult to find many who would disagree that it is more focused on fighting its own citizens than on serving us. In South Africa, it is quite ironic that the term "public servant" is used. The situation is such that the public themselves serve the government employees and elected officials, who are considered to be the elite benefiting from our hard-earned tax money. Who else among us is more vulnerable and weaker than our children? Is it any wonder their predatory antics are targeting children? Making formal schooling seem authorized by the Constitution and passing related laws was a big move to reduce parental authority over their kids. But it was just the beginning.
Salatiso Lonwabo Mdeni
Our goal with this book is to, for the first time, intentionally design an opt-in, diverse, multiphase ecosystem that can govern the interaction of multiple specialized cultures, which will serve society through their diversity of viewpoints, skill sets, and talents. Until now, competing cultures have been dumped into a geographic cage and forced to “figure it out for themselves” with only the barest of rules (like “don’t kill each other”) governing their interactions.
Malcolm Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Governance: From high school cliques to boards, family offices, and nations: A guide to optimizing governance models)
Social > National. Social networks change many things, but a critical one is that they change the nature of community. Your community is your social network, not necessarily the people who live near you. When the network identity is more salient than the neighor relationship, it challenges the very premise of the Westphalian state, which is that (a) people who live geographically near each other share values and (b) therefore laws should be based on geographic boundaries. The alternative is that only people who are geodesically near each other in the social network share values, and therefore the laws that govern them should be based on network boundaries.
Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)
As we continued to watch, the scenes accelerated forward, and we could see individuals remembering their spiritual missions at increasingly younger ages. Here we could see the precise understanding that would soon embody the new spiritual world-view. Individuals would come of age and remember themselves as souls born from one dimension of existence into another. Although memory loss during the transition would be expected, recapturing pre-life memory would become an important early goal of education. As youths, our teachers would first guide us through the early experience of synchronicity; urge us to identify our intuitions to study certain subjects, to visit particular places, always looking for higher answers as to why we were pursuing these particular paths. As the full memory of the Insights emerged, we would find ourselves involved with certain groups, working on particular projects, bringing in our full vision of what we had wanted to do. And finally we would recover the underlying intention behind our lives. We would know that we came here to raise the vibratory level of this planet, to discover and protect the beauty and energy of its natural sites, and to ensure that all humans had access to these special locations, so that we could continue to increase our energy, ultimately instituting the Afterlife culture here in the physical. Such a worldview would especially shift the way we looked at other people. No longer would we see human beings merely in the racial dress or national origin of one particular lifetime. Instead, we would see others as brother or sister souls, engaged, like us, in a process of coming awake and of spiritualizing the planet. It would become known that the settling of certain souls into various geographical locations on the planet had occurred with great meaning. Each nation was, in fact, an enclave of specific spiritual information, shared and modeled by its citizens, information waiting to be learned and integrated. As I watched the future unfold, I could see that a world political unity, envisioned by so many, was finally being achieved— not by forcing all nations into subservience to one political body, but rather through a grassroots acknowledgment of our spiritual similarities while treasuring our local autonomy and cultural differences. As with individuals interacting in a group, each member of the family of nations was being recognized for this culture truth represented to the world at large. Before us, we saw Earth’s political struggles, so often violent, shifting into a war of words. As the tide of remembrance continued to sweep the planet, all humans began to understand that our destiny was to discuss and compare the perspectives of our relative religions and, while honoring the best of their individual doctrines at the personal level, ultimately to see that each religion supplemented the others and to integrate them into a synthesized global spirituality.
James Redfield (The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision (Celestine Prophecy #2))
As two former empires, both with distinct identities and a strong sense of national pride, there is an island mentality in Iran that feels strangely familiar, a perverse pleasure to be found in going it alone, not being bossed around. Neither nation is particularly comfortable with the idea of mucking in with its neighbours – Britain with its scepticism towards Europe and inflated sense of importance in the world; Iran, an island of Shi-ite Muslims surrounded by Sunnis, geographically in the Middle East but definitely not Arabs – always, defiantly, neither East nor West. But there were gentler similarities too; an appreciation of the absurd and a sense of humour that celebrates the subversive and the silly, a love of the outdoors and an illustrious history of mountaineering and climbing, the national penchant for picnics and a profound appreciation of nature. Even the strange formalised politeness of ta’arof reminded me of our own British rituals of insistence and refusal when passing through a doorway or our habit of apologising when bumped into by a stranger. And, of course, our mutual inability to do anything without a cup of tea.
Lois Pryce (Revolutionary Ride: On the Road to Shiraz, the Heart of Iran)
She had not been conferred with a practical sense of how one went about this strange and all inverted business of being a girl, where seemingly natural stuff like going on about all the great things you just learned about Siberian tigers on National Geographic was suddenly weird, but totally weird stuff in and of itself like drawing around your eyeball with a pencil became normal, and it impressed to no end that it was a product of meticulous effort that made the twins seem so perfectly and effortlessly feminine.
Brian McGreevy (Hemlock Grove)
Alejandro de Humboldt National Park Outside of the major cities, the great majority of Cuba is agricultural or undeveloped. Cuba has a number of national parks where it is possible to see and enjoy some plants and animals that are truly unique to the region. Because it is relatively remote and limited in size, the Cuban Government has recognized the significance and sensitivity of the island’s biodiversity. It is for these reasons many of these parks have been set aside as protected areas and for the enjoyment of the people. One of these parks is the Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, named for Alexander von Humboldt a Prussian geographer, naturalist and explorer who traveled extensively in Latin America between 1799 and 1804. He explored the island of Cuba in 1800 and 1801. In the 1950’s during its time of the Cuban Embargo, the concept of nature reserves, on the island, was conceived with development on them continuing into the 1980’s, when a final sighting of the Royal Woodpecker, a Cuban subspecies of the ivory-billed woodpecker known as the “Campephilus principalis,” happened in this area. The Royal Woodpecker was already extinct in its former American habitats. This sighting in 1996, prompted these protected areas to form into a national park that was named Alejandro de Humboldt National Park. Unfortunately no further substantiated sightings of this species has bird has occurred and the species is now most likely extinct. The park, located on the eastern end of Cuba, is tropical and mostly considered a rain forest with mountains and some of the largest rivers in the Caribbean. Because it is the most humid place in Cuba it can be challenging to hike. The park has an area of 274.67 square miles and the elevation ranges from sea level to 3,832 feet at top of El Toldo Peak. In 2001 the park was declared a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. Tours are available for those interested in learning more about the flora & fauna, wild life and the natural medicines that are indigenous to these jungles. “The Exciting Story of Cuba” by award winning Captain Hank Bracker is available from Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, BooksAMillion.com and Independent Book Vendors. Read, Like & Share the daily blogs & weekly "From the Bridge" commentaries found on Facebook, Goodreads, Twitter and Captain Hank Bracker’s Webpage.
Hank Bracker
Carol built her cabin in the wilderness for many of the same reasons as Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, Carol was a student of nature and a geographical extension of the wilderness that surrounded her. Both explored a life stripped down to its essentials. They wanted “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau believed wilderness provided a necessary counterbalance to the materialism and urbanization of industrialized America. It was a place of self-renewal and contact with the raw material of life. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he famously wrote. Thoreau was among the first to advocate for protecting America’s vanishing wildlands, proposing that the nation formally preserve “a certain sample of wild nature . . . a network of national preserves in which the bear and the panther may still exist and not be civilized off the face of the earth.” Wilderness preserves could provide a perpetual frontier to keep overindustrialized Americans in contact with the primitive honesty of the woods. In 1872—the same year that Tom and Andy founded Carnegie Steel—America designated its first national park: over two million acres in northwest Wyoming were set aside as Yellowstone National Park. A second national park soon followed, thanks to the inspiration of Sierra Club founder John Muir. He so loved the Sierra that he proposed a fifteen-hundred-square-mile park around Yosemite Valley and spent decades fighting for it. When Yosemite National Park was finally signed into law in 1890, Muir
Will Harlan (Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island)
Being the Eternal Natural Way, Sanatana Dharma is a world-view that is universal in nature, and that can be followed by all. It is not relegated only to a particular people, nation, ethnicity or geographical region. Dharma is not a race, a parochial cultural expression, a nationality, or a geographically-bound phenomenon. Rather, Dharma is as universally applicable a truth and a systematic methodology as are the knowledge-revealing intellectual realms of mathematics, science, logic, or philosophy. As a result of the universalism of Dharma, this path is open to any sincere seeker on Earth, regardless of the person's national or ethnic heritage. Sanatana Dharma is not a race, a nationality or an ethnicity. Sanatana Dharma is not Indian, Asian or Eastern. Sanatana Dharma is he Eternal Natural Way, and it is the spiritual inheritance of all living being. (p. 28)
Dharma Pravartaka Acharya (Sanatana Dharma: The Eternal Natural Way)
Being the Eternal Natural Way, Sanatana Dharma is a world-view that is universal in nature, and that can be followed by all. It is not relegated only to a particular people, nation, ethnicity or geographical region. Dharma is not a race, a parochial cultural expression, a nationality, or a geographically-bound phenomenon. Rather, Dharma is as universally applicable a truth and a systematic methodology as are the knowledge-revealing intellectual realms of mathematics, science, logic, or philosophy. As a result of the universalism of Dharma, this path is open to any sincere seeker on Earth, regardless of the person's national or ethnic heritage. Sanatana Dharma is not a race, a nationality or an ethnicity. Sanatana Dharma is not Indian, Asian or Eastern. Sanatana Dharma is the Eternal Natural Way, and it is the spiritual inheritance of all living being. (p. 28)
Dharma Pravartaka Acharya (Sanatana Dharma: The Eternal Natural Way)