“
Let us take care of our Garden of Eden with the fragrance of its flowers and the oxygen of its sheltering trees and savor the fruits of each precious single moment ever since life can be a sparkling ballet expressing the beauties and values that enlighten and enrich us. ( "Why step out of nature?")
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
In my biology class, we'd talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don't, trees do, plastic doesn't. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are–brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn't settle; fire doesn't tolerate; fire doesn't 'get by.'
Fire does.
Fire is.
”
”
Dan Wells (I Am Not a Serial Killer (John Cleaver, #1))
“
He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.
”
”
Lauren DeStefano (Fever (The Chemical Garden, #2))
“
Plant trees. They give us two of the most crucial elements for our survival: oxygen and books.
”
”
Whitney Brown
“
Every walk in the forest is like taking a shower in oxygen.
”
”
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World)
“
He gave a hard smile and the oxygen in my lungs evaporated. “We
both know I’m not a gentleman.”
“Yeah. Okay, let me out. I’m tired.”
“There’s something else,” he said, and I groaned.
“What now?”
“This.” He stepped closer to me, so close that the containers were
sandwiched between us. His eyes
looked down into mine, intent and golden, like a lion.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” I hissed, dropping everything. I pushed hard
against his chest; it was like shoving
a tree.
“Yes,” he said very softly, leaning down. “Yes, I do.
”
”
Cate Tiernan (Immortal Beloved (Immortal Beloved, #1))
“
I read once that it takes 75,000 trees to produce one issue of the Sunday New York Times — and it's well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? Fuck 'em.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America)
“
Be exposed. Be open. Be who you want to be. It will never hurt as much as starving your own humanity of oxygen.
”
”
Warren Ellis (Trees, Vol. 1: In Shadow)
“
In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size & the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snails & worms create soil, & blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time.
”
”
Elisabeth Tova Bailey (The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating)
“
...but it was death that changed. People are still people. Some good, some bad. Death changed, and we don't know what death really means anymore. Maybe that was the point. Maybe this is an object lesson about the arrogance of our assumptions. Hard to say. But the world? She didn't change. She healed. We stopped hurting her and she began to heal. You can see it all around. The whole world is a forest now. The air is fresher. More trees, more oxygen.
”
”
Jonathan Maberry (Dust & Decay (Rot & Ruin, #2))
“
We were on the Congo’s eastern edge and, as the helicopter climbed higher, I could see nothing but an unbroken spread of vegetation. I was looking at the Congo’s rainforest, one of the natural wonders of the world. Conservationists describe it as one of the Earth’s lungs, an immense expanse of oxygen-generating green, matched in size only by the Amazonian rainforest. Explorers recorded it as one of the most impenetrable and hostile environments on the planet – as clammy as a pressure cooker, thick with disease, capped by a tree-top canopy too solid for sunlight to penetrate.
”
”
Tim Butcher (Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart)
“
I read once that it takes 75,000 trees to produce one issue of the Sunday New York Times – and it’s well worth every trembling leaf. So what if our grandchildren have no oxygen to breathe? Fuck ’em.
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (Bryson Book 12))
“
The human body runs on oxygen and the energy stores in carbon bonds. That’s how our bodies work. The human soul was built to run on communion with God. That’s how our souls work.
”
”
Matthew Sleeth (Reforesting Faith: What Trees Teach Us About the Nature of God and His Love for Us)
“
There is serenity and calm under the water's surface. You move easily and glimpse a world you have never seen before. You think of running out of oxygen and the idea of sharks dart out at you. You sense that there is something treacherous hiding behind every reef; no matter how much you explore you won't ever know what it is.
”
”
Jerzy Kosiński (The Devil Tree)
“
We fail to see the oneness of all things, and because of this, we unknowingly cause a lot of harm to ourselves. We pollute the Earth that we live on, cut down the trees that produce our oxygen, destroy the ecosystems of nature and the animals that maintain them, and we mistreat and harm each other, thinking that these destructive actions will not have a direct effect on us.
”
”
Joseph P. Kauffman (The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom)
“
When You Return
Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.
”
”
Ellen Bass (Like a Beggar)
“
Benji is running alone in another part of the forest. He finds new hiding places; he’s had a lot of practice over the years. He’s become a man who doesn’t take anything for granted; only children think certain things are self-evident: always having a best friend, for instance. Being allowed to be who we are. Being able to love who we want. Nothing is self-evident to Benji anymore; he just runs deeper into the forest until his brain is gasping for oxygen and he can no longer feel anything. Then he climbs up into a tree. And waits for the wind.
”
”
Fredrik Backman (Us Against You (Beartown, #2))
“
The plants are our greatest friends. They give us oxygen to breathe, food, water, shelter, medicine, and even fuel. You may enslave a pet with domesticity, a dog or cat, but eventually when the food runs out, they will be gone, by choice. The plants, however, never leave us. Perhaps that is why they have already begun to reduce carbon dioxide, the gas of life, and sunlight by way of chemical trails in the sky.
”
”
Jack Freestone
“
I think again about the Tree of Life. A wonderful notion that we as people are all stemmed and thrive from a tree springing life from branches reaching out to help our blood flow and providing oxygen to breathe.
”
”
Nicholas A. McGirr (The Life Tree (Tree Collection #1))
“
Now I can see: even the trees
are tired: they are bones bent forward
in a skin of wind, leaning in
osteoporosis, reaching
for a little more than any
oxygen can give: when living
is in season, they can live;
but living is no reason
to continue: everything begins:
and everything is desperate
to extend: and everything is
insufficient in the end:
and everything is ending:
Now I can see: even the trees
”
”
Malachi Black
“
I think my response to hearing that alarm would have been to grab an extinguisher and start fighting for my life, but over the past 21 years that instinct has been trained out of me and another set of responses has been trained in, represented by three words: warn, gather, work. “Working the problem” is NASA-speak for descending one decision tree after another, methodically looking for a solution until you run out of oxygen. We practice the “warn, gather, work” protocol for responding to fire alarms so frequently that it doesn’t just become second nature; it actually supplants our natural instincts.
”
”
Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth)
“
we can learn a lot from a tree; she
gives so much without expecting
anything in return. oxygen, shade,
fruit, resources. she is proud of her
roots and tough to tear down.
try to be more like a tree.
give without expectations, be
proud, be strong.
”
”
JaTawny Muckelvene Chatmon (Getting Lost)
“
There needs to be an intersection of the set of people who wish to go, and the set of people who can afford to go...and that intersection of sets has to be enough to establish a self-sustaining civilisation. My rough guess is that for a half-million dollars, there are enough people that could afford to go and would want to go. But it’s not going to be a vacation jaunt. It’s going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies...even at a million people you’re assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil.Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we’re talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship...If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonise the whole Solar System, because we’ll have created a strong economic forcing function for the improvement of space travel. We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones for sure, and probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have that forcing function, and an Earth-to-Mars economy, we’ll cover the whole Solar System. But the key is that we have to make the Mars thing work. If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilisation. That’s the next step.
”
”
Elon Musk
“
Age, that brings a dwindling to most forms of life, is at its most majestic in the trees. I have seen living olives that were planted when Caesar was in Gaul. I remember, in Illinois woods, a burr oak which was bent over as a sapling a hundred years ago, to mark an Indian portage trail, and the thews in that flexed bough were still in the prime of life. Compared to that, the strongest human sinew is feeble and quick to decay. Yet structure in both cases is cellular; life in both is protoplasmic. A tree drinks water as I do, and breathes oxygen. There is the difference that it exhales more oxygen than it consumes, so that it sweetens the air where it grows. It lays the dust and tempers the wind. Even when it is felled, it but enters on a new kind of life. Sawn and seasoned and finished, it lays bare the hidden beauty of its heart, in figures and grains more lovely than the most premeditated design. It is stronger, now, than it was in the living tree, and may bear great strains and take many shapes.
”
”
Donald Culross Peattie (American Heartwood)
“
Working the problem” is NASA-speak for descending one decision tree after another, methodically looking for a solution until you run out of oxygen.
”
”
Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth)
“
Sowing a seed after tasting fruit.
Saving oceanic planktons and planting trees after taking oxygen from them. Thus we can maintain the benevolence of give and take policy.
”
”
RESHMA CHEKNATH UMESH
“
Life itself turned our planet blue and green, as tiny photosynthetic bacteria cleansed the oceans of air and sea, and filled them with oxygen. Powered by this new and potent source of energy, life erupted. Flowers bloom and beckon, intricate corals hide darting gold fish, vast monsters lurk in black depths, trees reach for the sky, animals buzz and lumber and see. And in the midst of it all, we are moved by the untold mysteries of this creation, we cosmic assemblies of molecules that feel and think and marvel and wonder at how we came to be here.
”
”
Nick Lane (Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution)
“
The knowledge that the world has given you is nothing but a set of robotic commands. It has turned you into robot:
What is it? Milk. What to do with it? Bring it from the shop, boil it and drink.
What is it? Tree. What to do with it? Just ignore it. It is there to keep your oxygen levels normal.
And so on. It has made you into robot. It has given you an illusion of freewill and choice.
”
”
Shunya
“
the world in silver and copper and iron.” Simon crawled to the edge of the cage. “That doesn’t make any sense. What are you going to eat? How are you going to breathe without plants to make oxygen?
”
”
Tony DiTerlizzi (The Ironwood Tree (The Spiderwick Chronicles, #4))
“
And now I need To do something Excessively Indian So I will name All of the pine trees On the reservation. That one is Mother And that one over There is Mother And so is that third Pine in the valley And that tall one On the ridge is Mother. Okay, I’m either lazy Or I have an arboreal strain Of Oedipus complex. So let me take this down A few degrees. That pine, the closest one To my mother’s grave— I imagine its roots Will eventually feed On what my mother Will become After many years In the earth. So let my mother Be that tree And let that one tree Be my mother. And let my Mother Tree Turn every toxin Into oxygen So that my siblings And I can finally And simply breathe.
”
”
Sherman Alexie (You Don't Have to Say You Love Me)
“
The family tree of each of us is graced by all those great inventors: the beings who first tried out self-replication, the manufacture of protein machine tools, the cell, cooperation, predation, symbiosis, photosynthesis, breathing oxygen, sex, hormones, brains, and all the rest-inventions we use, some of them, minute-by-minute without ever wondering who devised them and how much we owe to these unknown benefactors, in a chain 100 billion links long.
”
”
Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors)
“
Plunge a sponge into Lake Erie. Did you absorb every drop? Take a deep breath. Did you suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere? Pluck a pine needle from a tree in Yosemite. Did you deplete the forest of foliage? Watch an ocean wave crash against the beach. Will there never be another one? Of course there will. No sooner will one wave crash into the sand than another appears. Then another, then another. This is a picture of God’s sufficient grace. Grace is simply another word for God’s tumbling, rumbling reservoir of strength and protection. It comes at us not occasionally or miserly but constantly and aggressively, wave upon wave. We’ve barely regained our balance from one breaker, and then, bam, here comes another.
”
”
Max Lucado (Grace: More Than We Deserve, Greater Than We Imagine)
“
She did not respond, only clung harder to my embrace, and I held her with all the afflictions of a man torn by love. What a miracle she was, what a truly exquisite paragon of beauty and virtue so incredibly combined. And all perhaps wrenched from my grasp because of a war I had no real interest in nor knowledge of. In that moment I did not care who won, if only it would end and I could be with her. I would accept the whole responsibility of defeat if I had to, if only it meant a life with her by my side.
I just wanted her. Needed her. As simply and clearly as one needs food and oxygen and light, I needed her in my life.
And above us, flittering tranquilly in the trees above, the finches and skylarks continued to sing peacefully into the fading sun.
”
”
Jamie L. Harding
“
Tree's are life. Not just my life", she would add, since her fields were forests and ecology, "but life period. They literally make oxygen. We need to keep at least seven trees for every human the planet, or else people are going to start suffocating. Think of that.
”
”
Therese Anne Fowler (A Good Neighborhood)
“
When the sun rises above the lake, when the mornings are so cold that the oxygen itself is crisp, when the trees seem to bow respectfully over the ice in order to let as much light as possible reach the children playing on it, then you can’t help wondering how anyone could choose to live in places where all you can see are concrete and buildings.
”
”
Fredrik Backman (Beartown (Beartown, #1))
“
Plants are our food, oxygen, and medicine. Some even say they are one of the most pleasurable experiences on earth! From the flowers to the trees and the seas filled with coral dreams; the earth’s natural flora has inspired and enhanced humans for as long as time can tell. That’s why the power of plants is the key to unlocking our enjoyment of life.
”
”
Natasha Potter
“
There were plenty of wires and batteries around to make a spark. But you can’t just ignite wood with a small electric spark. So I collected ribbons of bark from local palm trees, then got a couple of sticks and rubbed them together to create enough friction to … No not really. I vented pure oxygen at the stick and gave it a spark. It lit up like a match.
”
”
Andy Weir (The Martian)
“
am recalling now how during that last spring (forever) we walked together at full moon, overcome by the soft dazed air of the city, the quiet ablutions of water and moonlight that polished it like a great casket. An aerial lunacy among the deserted trees of the dark squares, and the long dusty roads reaching away from midnight to midnight, bluer than oxygen.
”
”
Lawrence Durrell (The Alexandria Quartet)
“
bombs poured down from the sky exploding across trachimbrod in bursts of light and heat those watching the festivities hollered ran frantically they jumped into the bubbling splashing frantically dynamic water not after the sack of gold buy to save themselves they stayed under as long as they could they surfaced to seize air and look for loved ones my safran picked up his wife and carried her like a newlywed into the water which seemed amid the falling trees and hackling crackling explosions the safest place hundreds of bodies poured into the brod that river with my name I embraced them with open arms come to me come I wanted to save them all to save everybody from everybody the bombs rained from the sky and it was not the explosions or scattering shrapnel that would be our death not the heckling cinders not the laughing debris but all of the bodies bodies flailing and grabbing hold of one another bodies looking something to hold on to my safran lost sight of his wife who was carried deeper into me by the pull of the bodies the silent shrieks were carried in bubbles to the surface where they popped PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE the kicking in zosha’s belly became more and more PLEASE PLEASE the baby refused to die like this PLEASE the bombs came down cackling smoldering and my safran was able to break free from the human mass and float downstream over the small falls to clearer waters zosha was pulled down PLEASE and the baby refusing to die like this was pulled up and out of her body turning the waters around her red she surfaced like a bubble to the light to oxygen to life to life WAWAWAWAWAWA she cried she was perfectly healthy and she would have lived except for the umbilical cord that pulled her back under toward her mother who was barely conscious but conscious of the cord and tried to break it with her hands and then bite it with her teeth but could not it would not be broken and she died with her perfectly healthy nameless baby in her arms she held it to her chest the crowd pulled itself into itself long after the bombing ceased the confused the frightened the desperate mass of babies children teenagers adults elderly all pulled at each other to survive but pulled each other into me drowning each other killing each other the bodies began to rise one at a time until I couldn’t be seen through all of the bodies blue skin open white eyes I was invisible under them I was the carcass they were the butterflies white eyes blue skin this is what we’ve done we’ve killed our own babies to save them
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated)
“
As the last of the debris fell behind her and the crash of thunder rolled away through the city, as she came to the east end of the park, the once-dark sky paled, abruptly glaucous, and cataracts of rain fell hard, fat droplets hissing through the trees and grass, snapping off the pavement, plinking the metal hoods on trash cans, carrying with them the faint bleachy odor of ozone, a form of oxygen created by lightning’s alchemy.
”
”
Dean Koontz (The Silent Corner (Jane Hawk, #1))
“
Anything perceived as a threat trips the amygdala—the brain’s hand-wringing sentry—to set in motion the biochemical cascade known as the fight-or-flight response. Bruce Siddle, who consults in this area and sits on the board of Strategic Operations, prefers the term “survival stress response.” Whatever you wish to call it, here is a nice, concise summary, courtesy of Siddle: “You become fast, strong, and dumb.” Our hardwired survival strategy evolved back when threats took the form of man-eating mammals, when hurling a rock superhumanly hard or climbing a tree superhumanly fast gave you the edge that might keep you alive. A burst of adrenaline prompts a cortisol dump to the bloodstream. The cortisol sends the lungs into overdrive to bring in more oxygen, and the heart rate doubles or triples to deliver it more swiftly. Meanwhile the liver spews glucose, more fuel for the feats at hand. To get the goods where the body assumes they’re needed, blood vessels in the large muscles of the arms and legs dilate, while vessels serving lower-priority organs (the gut, for example, and the skin) constrict. The prefrontal cortex, a major blood guzzler, also gets rationed. Good-bye, reasoning and analysis. See you later, fine motor skills. None of that mattered much to early man. You don’t need to weigh your options in the face of a snarling predator, and you don’t have time.
”
”
Mary Roach (Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War)
“
Many of you remember when Dutch Elm disease swept the East Coast. People in big cities saw the trees die but it didn’t register, in any way at all, that this would compromise oxygen. Think of it, that many trees dying in that short a time span means there is less photosynthesis. Less oxygen is being produced. Therefore pollution in the big cities becomes more pronounced. These basics do not occur to people who work in buildings where the windows don’t open.
”
”
Rita Mae Brown (Sour Puss (Mrs. Murphy, #14))
“
A man is building his house. Though warned by his friends it isn’t a safe design, he refuses to listen. There’s an earthquake, and the house collapses. He and a bird that lived in a tree near the house become trapped.” Amisha searched the students’ faces and was pleased to see their interest. “There is only one small hole through which to breathe. The man must decide who gets the oxygen.” She paused to make sure she still had their attention. “Please write about what happens next.
”
”
Sejal Badani (The Storyteller's Secret)
“
As the trees died, their bodies fell into the swamps and accumulated underwater, being slowly entombed by sediment brought down by the rivers. Beyond the reach of oxygen and the normal processes of decomposition, their carbon-laden tissues, buried beneath mud and sand, were compressed and eventually became coal. Subsequently, over several hundred million years, plankton and algae that flourished in ancient seas and stagnant lakes have, on occasions, been buried at depth and turned into oil and inflammable gas.
”
”
David Attenborough (A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future)
“
A person breathes in nearly 2 pounds of oxygen a day, so that's the daily requirement for about ten thousand people. Every walk in the forest is like taking a shower in oxygen. But only during the day. Trees manufacture large amounts of carbohydrates not only to lay them down as wood but also to satisfy their hunger. Trees use carbohydrates as fuel, just as we do, and when they do, they convert sugar into energy and carbon dioxide. During the day, this doesn't affect the air much because after all the additions and subtractions, there is still that surplus oxygen I just mentioned. At night, however, the trees don't photosynthesize, and so they don't break down carbon dioxide. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the darkness, it's all about using carbohydrates, burning sugar in the cells' power-generating stations, and releasing carbon dioxide. But don't worry, you won't suffocate if you take a nighttime ramble! A steady movement of air through the forest ensures that all the gases are well mixed at all times, and so the drop in oxygen near the ground is not particularly noticeable.
”
”
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World)
“
SANCTUARY
the safest place in the world is a book
is a shifting land on top of a tree
so high up that a belt can't reach
is a closet opening into snow with
a tropical child tumbling through
is a river, a mermaid, a spaceship
a girl with living tentacles for hair
is a red-horned, gold-feathered angel
a dusty crocodile on a second star
is a fractional platform, another family
one with only soft mothers and aunts
is a meadow, is a menu of words
an oxygen mask, chest compressions
is a map for someone who has died
many times, and wants to come back.
”
”
Akwaeke Emezi (Content Warning: Everything)
“
Did you know,” North said, as he hung a feathery blue jay, “that real trees are better for the environment than fake ones? A lot of people think the fake ones are better, because you have to throw out the real ones every year, but real trees produce oxygen and provide wildlife habitats while they grow, and then, when they’re done, they can be ground into mulch to fertilize the earth. While the plastic ones just… rot in landfills. They can take hundreds of years to decompose.”
Marigold waited until he was done with his rant. “Yeah,” she said. “I know.
”
”
Stephanie Perkins (My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories)
“
So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.
”
”
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
“
Then I had to invent fire.
NASA put a lot of effort into making sure nothing here can burn. Everything is made of metal or flame-retardant plastic and the uniforms are synthetic. I needed something that could hold a flame, some kind of pilot light. I don’t have the skills to keep enough H2 flowing to feed a flame without killing myself. Too narrow a margin there.
After a search of everyone’s personal items (hey, if they wanted privacy, they shouldn’t have abandoned me on Mars with their stuff) I found my answer.
Martinez is a devout Catholic. I knew that. What I didn’t know was he brought along a small wooden cross. I’m sure NASA gave him shit about it, but I also know Martinez is one stubborn son of a bitch.
I chipped his sacred religious item into long splinters using a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. I figure if there’s a God, He won’t mind, considering the situation I’m in.
If ruining the only religious icon I have leaves me vulnerable to Martian vampires, I’ll have to risk it.
There were plenty of wires and batteries around to make a spark. But you can’t just ignite wood with a small electric spark. So I collected ribbons of bark from local palm trees, then got a couple of sticks and rubbed them together to create enough friction to…
No not really. I vented pure oxygen at the stick and gave it a spark. It lit up like a match.
”
”
Andy Weir (The Martian)
“
Higher temperatures means more forest fires means fewer trees means less carbon absorption, means more carbon in the atmosphere, means a hotter planet still—and so on. A warmer planet means more water vapor in the atmosphere, and, water vapor being a greenhouse gas, this brings higher temperatures still—and so on. Warmer oceans can absorb less heat, which means more stays in the air, and contain less oxygen, which is doom for phytoplankton—which does for the ocean what plants do on land, eating carbon and producing oxygen—which leaves us with more carbon, which heats the planet further. And so on. These are the systems climate scientists call “feedbacks”; there are more.
”
”
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
“
Really, her spirit is everywhere, Lily, just everywhere. Inside rocks and trees and even people, but sometimes it will get concentrated in certain places and just beam out at you in a special way.'
I had never thought of it like that, and it gave me a shocked feeling, like maybe I had no idea what kind of world I was actually living in, and maybe the teachers at my school didn't know either, the way they talked about everything being nothing but carbon and oxygen and mineral, the dullest stuff you can imagine. I started thinking about the world loaded with disguised Marys sitting around all over the place and hidden red hearts tucked about that people could rub and touch, only we didn't recognize them.
”
”
Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)
“
The United States of America has now reached a whole new level of patriarchal absurdity. You mean they massacred the Indians, enslaved the Africans, cut down all the trees, poisoned all the rivers, and extinguished or imprisoned all the animals for THIS, this hellhole of bombast and hamburgers and opioid addictions and cardboard-box houses and pretend ideas? You mean they used up all the oxygen on 4th of July firecrackers and forcing kids to pledge allegiance to the flag every goddam day, drank Coke till they choked, spat tobaccy till they puked, fought cancer (but only for people with lots of money), nestled in Nestlés, slurped slurpees, burped burpees, handed on herpes, Tasered the wayward, jailed the frail and tortured about a million billion chickens (then fried and ate them), just so people can drive around and shoot each other and create GoFundMe sites to pay the hospital bills?
”
”
Lucy Ellmann (Things Are Against Us)
“
In 1969, NASA scientist James Lovelock noticed something unusual happening in the earth’s atmosphere: inexplicably, its balance of oxygen and other gases was regulating itself like a thermostat. But what was doing the regulating? He looked at other planetary processes—including the stable concentration of ocean salinity and the cycling of nutrients—and came to a startling conclusion: the earth is alive. He proposed that the earth is a superorganism—one giant living system that includes not just animals and plants but rocks, gases, and soil—acting together as if the planet was a single living being. Its bodily systems, such as the water cycle and nitrogen cycle, are balanced to maintain life on earth. The throb of the tides was the systole and diastole of the earth, and water coursed like blood through its veins. We proud humans may simply be microbes on the surface of a superbeing whose entirety we cannot fully comprehend. Like the bacteria in our body, is it possible that we, too, are part of a larger living earth, a speck on the eyeball of the universe? Tree roots break the sidewalk. Dandelions spring through the cracks. Insects grow resistant to pesticides
”
”
Will Harlan (Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island)
“
The last summer of his life he sat hours together on the old chintz-covered swing-bed in front of the willow tree, chain-smoking Woodbines and watching the shadows flood the lawn until they swallowed him and only the tip of his ciggarette still showed, a faint red pulse. How she had longed to bring him in, to rescue him as he had rescued his sergeant. Her mother wasn't up to it, sitting all day in the kitchen listening to Alma Cogan and Ronnie Hilton on the wireless, biting her nails until they bled. So, it was she who had gone, crossing the lawn at dusk to stand in front of him, waiting for the right words to come into her head, for a dove that would bring her the gift of speech. But nothing came, and he had gazed at her through the smoke of his ciggarette as though from the far side of a pane of glass. He felt sorry for her perhaps, knowing why she had come out, knowing the impossibility of it. But instead of saying, sit down beside me Alice, sit down, daughter, and we will try to understand together the unbearable truth that love is not always enough, that people cannot always be brought back in, he had said, very conservatively, as though in reference to a discussion he had been having with her in his head for weeks, 'They used flame-throwers, you know'. And she had nodded, yes, Daddy, and left him, and gone to her room, and pushed her face into the pillow and bawled. Because she should have done it, should have, and she had failed.
”
”
Andrew Miller
“
You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?
You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella.
You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder around the entire pine…and pour wet plaster over and inside the pine. Now open the walls, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air.
You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium…you are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are god- are you tired? Finished?
”
”
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
“
In my biology class, we’d talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don’t; trees do, plastic doesn’t. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon.
”
”
Dan Wells (I Am Not a Serial Killer (John Cleaver, #1))
“
Exhaust from the arrogance
Breathe
At what cost
Oxygen from trees
Mother's vein
She bleeds
Drink from the river
Plastic and fees
Politics and media
Streaming what to believe
It's your story not his
Be the author of what you read
Content is within
Not what you see
”
”
Andrew Edward Lucier (Awakenigma Allegory Anomalous)
“
exhaustion. Fear was fueling each step now. Another thunderous bellow rang in the distance, followed by the terrible sound of falling trees and shrieking animals. “We have to find a way to stop it,” Daphne cried between gasps. Sabrina knew her little sister was right. But how? They were two children versus a vicious monster. “I’ll think of something,” Sabrina said, dragging her sister behind an enormous oak tree for a much-needed rest. Sabrina squeezed her sister’s hand to reassure her, while she forced oxygen into her own burning lungs. Her words were empty. She didn’t have a plan. The only thing going on in her head was the thumping of blood roaring through her eardrums. But it made no difference. It had found them. Splintering wood and damp soil rained from the sky as the tree they stood next to was violently uprooted. The two girls looked up into the horrible face above them and felt hot breath blow through their hair. What’s happened to our lives? Sabrina wondered. When had their world become unrecognizable? And what had happened to her, the eleven-year-old girl who only two days ago had been just an orphan on a train?
”
”
Michael Buckley (The Fairy-Tale Detectives (The Sisters Grimm, #1))
“
In my biology class, we’d talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don’t; trees do, plastic doesn’t. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are—brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn’t settle; fire doesn’t tolerate; fire doesn’t “get by.” Fire does. Fire is.
”
”
Dan Wells (I Am Not a Serial Killer (John Cleaver, #1))
“
I Myself Begins to Ask God When
One large tree can supply a
supply of oxygen for four people
What is Use of Killing of Tress
Dadagari Jeelan
”
”
Dadagari Jeelan
“
We know a great deal more than the Greeks did about the forces of life. But with all our knowledge, no one fully comprehends the miraculous process, known as photosynthesis, by which trees and other green plants use energy from the sun to transform elements into food for themselves at the same time that they release oxygen into the atmosphere. Photosynthesis makes life on Earth possible, and it is the most important function performed by green plants of all kinds.
”
”
Richard M. Ketchum (The Secret Life of the Forest)
“
I remember the first time I decided to try to put on more Joy.
As if Joy was a perfume sample I tried on briefly at the mall and liked so much--how it made me feel to walk into a room smelling like distilled righteousness--that I decided to buy a travel size so I could carry it with me at all times. An easy application for a quick cover-up. a potent enough aroma of pep in my step to cover all manner of bad days.
...
The first time I tried to put on Joy like it's something that you wear, it ended up biting me in the backside.
Because that's what happens when we try to use Joy to mask, to cover up, but never to actually heal.
...
Either way, it's not fooling anyone.
And either way, that's not how true Joy works.
True Joy doesn't overpower. It doesn't accost someone until we are the only thing they can smell in the room. True Joy is a breath of fresh air. It is a permission to breathe easier. It is an invitation, not a full-scale assault on the senses.
It also isn't an overdesigned, overstaged, mass-marketed picture of perfection. To me, true Joy is like a tree planted by the water.
It gives more oxygen than it takes. It provides shade and shelter to those who want to come and sit by it for a while. It is a welcome place of belonging. A much-needed respite for the weary. A place to come and rest their tired souls.
... (reference to Jeremiah 17:8)...
Joy was never only for those found laughing in a field of flowers. It is also for anyone who finds themselves weeping in the thickest part of the weeds.
Joy doesn't mean the drought won't come and the storms won't rage.
It just means that when they do, you'll know where you're planted. You'll know what it is you're anchored to.
”
”
Mary Marantz (Dirt: Growing Strong Roots in What Makes the Broken Beautiful)
“
some places in North America, notably the American South, trees such as baldcypress have root systems that spend a lot of time underwater. To get around the problem of submerged roots, baldcypress trees grow “knees.” These specialized roots rise out of the ground around the main trunk. (Yet another hazard to the unwary hiker if these roots are growing right in the trail, which can happen.) Cypress knees can grow up to ten feet (three meters) tall, which is tall enough to extend above the average high-water line, and they are thought not only to stabilize the trees in their watery environment, but also to help the roots breathe by transporting oxygen from the air to the parts that are submerged, acting as a kind of snorkel—although
”
”
Peter Wohlleben (Forest Walking: Discovering the Trees and Woodlands of North America)
“
Trees are superheroes of the climate fight. They inhale CO2 and exhale oxygen, filtering out air pollution with each breath. They suck up water from the ground and sweat it out through their leaves, which cools the air (think of them as mini air conditioners). And of course, they provide shade to all creatures great and small, as well as to the soil around them, which helps to reduce water loss through evaporation. As anyone who has taken a walk through a city park knows, they also offer mental health benefits to stressed-out urbanites. Trees are our deep-time evolutionary companions, fellow living things that we have spent millions of years leaning against, climbing, and worshipping.
”
”
Jeff Goodell (The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet)
“
When you see a tiny plant, flower or tree in a dark stone street, be happy as if you saw a friend you love very much, and be even happier because this is such a friend that does wonderful things for your existence, it gives you oxygen!
”
”
Mehmet Murat ildan
“
Something vast suddenly crossed my field of vision. By the time I had reacted and adjusted the magnification, it had passed out of sight into the works shed. I had a brief memory of bright, almost gaudy metal and a shimmering, flowing robe. ‘What the hell was that?’ I hissed. Midas looked at me, lowering his scope, actual fear on his face. Fischig also looked disturbed. ‘A giant, a horned giant in jewelled metal,’ Midas said. ‘He came striding out of the modular hab to the left and went straight into the shed. God-Emperor, but it was huge!’ Fischig agreed with a nod. ‘A monster,’ he said. The cones above roared again, and a rain of withering ash fluttered down across the settlement. We shrank back into the thorn-trees. Guard activity seemed to increase. ‘Rosethorn,’ my vox piped. ‘Now is not a good time,’ I hissed. It was Maxilla. He sent one final word and cut off. ‘Sanctum.’ ‘Sanctum’ was a Glossia codeword that I had given Maxilla before we had left the Essene. I wanted him in close orbit, providing us with extraction cover and overhead sensor advantages, but knew that he would have to melt away the moment any other traffic entered the system. ‘Sanctum’ meant that he had detected a ship or ships emerging from the immaterium into realspace, and was withdrawing to a concealment orbit behind the local star. Which meant that all of us on the planet were on our own. Midas caught my sleeve and pointed down at the settlement. The giant had reappeared and stood in plain view at the mouth of the shed. He was well over two metres tall, wrapped in a cloak that seemed to be made of smoke and silk, and his ornately decorated armour and horned helmet were a shocking mixture of chased gold, acidic yellow, glossy purple, and the red of fresh, oxygenated blood. In his ancient armour, the monster looked like he had stood immobile in that spot for a thousand years. Just a glance at him inspired terror and revulsion, involuntary feelings of dread that I could barely repress. A Space Marine, from the corrupted and damned Adeptus Astartes. A Chaos Marine.
”
”
Dan Abnett (Eisenhorn: The Omnibus (Eisenhorn: Warhammer 40,000))
“
Maybe plants are actually farming humans, and they give us oxygen until we die just to turn us into fertilizer, thought another customer.
”
”
Jean-Paul Badjo (Konfaga: Roots of a Very Old Tree)
“
Life on this planet has been evolving and transforming itself since the beginning of time as we know it. It is not poetry, but science when I say this: we are descendants of fish that crawled out of the ocean. We breathe air exhaled from trees whose leaves are made of starlight. We have oxygen thanks to the primordial kelps that created this biosphere. The mushrooms we eat come from space; they strengthen both the communications networks in our brains as well as between the plants and soil. We have stardust in our bones. Our veins echo the patterns of rivers, branches, and root system. The moon moves the blood in women’s wombs to the same rhythm as the tides of the oceans.
We are not a part of Nature. We are Nature.
”
”
Marysia Miernowska (The Witch's Herbal Apothecary: Rituals & Recipes for a Year of Earth Magick and Sacred Medicine Making)
“
claiming that a little piece of green paper is more important than, say, the tree it’s made from—even though that tree provides oxygen and absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Without the trees, we would all die out, but cash is an invention that is less than two thousand years old.
”
”
Bella Forrest (A Shade of Dragon (A Shade of Dragon #1))
“
I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are.
I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems.
So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one…
The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.
”
”
Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)
“
In Mexico City, air pollution, acid rain, photochemical oxidants and soil erosion have been killing off the city’s plants and trees for decades. The sycamore trees that lined Avenida Reforma in the 1990s all died, and in 2005 thousands of sickly trees in Chapultepec Park had to be cut down due to deterioration from the effects of air pollution. The greatest damage caused by air pollution occurs within the forests that surround the city, especially among the pine tress in the woods of Ajusco and the Desierto de los Leones, two main oxygen sources of the city.
”
”
Kurt Hollander (Several Ways to Die in Mexico City: An Autobiography of Death in Mexico City)
“
In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn’t be linear. Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss.
By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance.
”
”
Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
“
Every day in summer, trees release about 29 tons of oxygen into the air per square mile of forest. A person breathes in nearly 2 pounds of oxygen a day, so that's the daily requirement for about ten thousand people. Every walk in the forest is like taking a shower in oxygen. But only during the day. Trees manufacture large amounts of carbohydrates not only to lay them down as wood but also to satisfy their hunger. Trees use carbohydrates as fuel, just as we do, and when they do, they convert sugar into energy and carbon dioxide. During the day, this doesn't affect the air much because after all the additions and subtractions, there is still that surplus oxygen I just mentioned. At night, however, the trees don't photosynthesize, and so they don't break down carbon dioxide. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the darkness, it's all about using carbohydrates, burning sugar in the cells' power-generating stations, and releasing carbon dioxide. But don't worry, you won't suffocate if you take a nighttime ramble! A steady movement of air through the forest ensures that all the gases are well mixed at all times, and so the drop in oxygen near the ground is not particularly noticeable.
”
”
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World)
“
A multitude of algae live in salt water. Thanks to them, large amounts of oxygen bubble out of the ocean year round. Algal activity in the oceans balances the oxygen deficit in Central European forests in the winter so well that we can breathe deeply even when we are standing under beeches and spruce covered in snow.
”
”
Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries from a Secret World)
“
In my biology class, we’d talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don’t; trees do, plastic doesn’t. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are—brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn’t settle; fire doesn’t tolerate; fire doesn’t “get by.” Fire does.
”
”
Dan Wells (I Am Not a Serial Killer (John Cleaver, #1))
“
The substance of a tree is carbon and where did that come from? That comes from the air; it’s carbon dioxide from the air. People look at trees and they think it [the substance of the tree] comes out of the ground; plants grow out of the ground. But if you ask “where does the substance come from” you find out … the trees come out of the air … the carbon dioxide and the air goes into the tree and it changes it, kicking out the oxygen.… We know that the oxygen and carbon [in carbon dioxide] stick together very tight … how does the tree manage to undo that so easily? … It is the sunlight that comes down and knocks this oxygen away from the carbon … leaving the carbon, and water, to make the substance of the tree! RICHARD FEYNMAN
”
”
Johnjoe McFadden (Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology)
“
I often imagine what our lives would be like without trees. We won't even dwell on the fact that our atmosphere would be sorely lacking in oxygen...The tree gave human beings everything, but today it has received little in the way of thanks.
”
”
Alain Baraton (Gardener of Versailles: My Life in the World's Grandest Garden)
“
Imagine a day when all plants and trees go on a strike, a bandh just for a day. All of us will die for want of oxygen.” Reading this, I was instantly reminded of Bolivia’s recent legislation (in December 2010) to grant all nature equal rights as humans. Justice William O. Douglas, writing against a 1972 decision by the United States Supreme Court, wrote, “Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation ... So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life ... The voice of the inanimate object, therefore, should not be stilled.
”
”
Anonymous
“
everything that exists owes its existence to a complex set of relationships that—if you trace the relationships all the way out through space and all the way back in time—ultimately involves everything. As humans, for example, we are utterly dependent upon the parents who conceived us, the plants and animals that daily provide our nourishment, the trees that give us oxygen, the sun that warms the atmosphere, and so on—out through space and back in time. We are constituted by these relationships. This principle applies to everything whatsoever. Nothing is what it is strictly within itself.
”
”
Galen Guengerich (God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age)
“
Can the trees and flowers which we see all around us at all times have themselves formed such perfect systems as to bring about a phenomenon such as photosynthesis, some parts of which are still not fully understood, in their own bodies? Did plants choose to use carbon dioxide (CO2), of the gases in the air, to produce food? Did they themselves determine the amount of CO2 they would use? Could plants have designed those mechanisms which make up the root system and which enable them to take the materials necessary for photosynthesis from the soil? Did plants bring about a transport system where different types of tubes are used for transporting nutrients and water? As ever, defenders of the theory of evolution searching for an answer
16
The solar energy trapped by the chlorophyll in the leaf, carbon-dioxide in the air, and water in the plant go through various processes and are used to produce glucose and oxygen. These complex processes do not take place in a factory, but in special structures like those in the leaf in the picture, and which measure only one thousandth of a millimeter across.
Sunlight
Chlorophyll
Glucose
6H2O Water
Light
Chlorophyll
Carbon dioxide + Water
Glucose + Oxygen
6CO2 Carbon dioxide
6O2 Oxygen
C6 H12O 6
to the question of how plants emerged have resorted to "chance" as their only re m e d y. They have claimed that from one species of plant which came about by chance, an infinite variety of plants have emerged, again by chance, and that features such as smell, taste, and colour, particular to each species, again came about by chance. But they have been unable to give any scientific proof of these claims. Evolutionists explain moss turning into a strawberry plant, or a poplar, or a rose bush, by saying that conditions brought about by chance differentiated them. Whereas when just one plant cell is observed, a system so complex will be seen as could not have come about by minute changes over time. This complex system and other mechanisms in plants definitively disprove the coincidence scenarios put forward as evolutionist logic. In this situation just one result emerges.
”
”
Harun Yahya (The Miracle Of Creation In Plants)
“
Our earth is the life-giving force for every living being, and life in it is derived from the energy generated from the invaluable elements of nature.
The most important element among these invaluable elements is "Soil" which is the most indispensable component of our environment and from this the major energy of life is discharged.
We place more emphasis on planting trees in the concept of keeping the environment safe and pure, but do not give much ponderability to the protection of the Soil that nourishes these trees.
The proper nutrition of every seed is completely dependent on the fertilizing capacity of the Soil and the seeds which provide us fruits, flowers, oxygen etc., without which our lives and other living beings are not presumable.
Soil mainly conducts the life of all beings including human beings, as well as the land of our earth is the most vital source of power, the most preciosity resource of our earth.
Conserving the Soil is our utmost accountability so that in the coming times our environment can be made even more preferential. Without Soil no one life and isomorphism of our nature is not possible, since every living being is dependent on Soil itself; Soil is our complement and we are completely envolved with Soil.
"Conservation of the Soil is the protection of lives, then save the Soil, save the lives.
”
”
Viraaj Sisodiya
“
Because that is what trees do." His voice is urgent, insistent. "They take in what would otherwise be destructive, and they use it. They change it. They let it change them. And then, they put something useful back out into the world. Oxygen. Life. This is what we can do. Pretend we are trees when life feels hard. Breathe it in. Soften it. Let it change you. Let your heart, your mind change it. Then offer the world whatever it is inside you that is needed. Peace. Courage. Light. A cup of tea and a good laugh. Don't hide from the sorrows of the world. Welcome them in. Watch them transform. Be a tree in your life.
”
”
Amy Spurway (Crow)
“
This stabilizes water flow in streams which, in turn, prevents scouring and the destruction of aquatic communities of insects, crustaceans, and fish. Who needs healthy stream communities? Well, who needs plentiful, reliable, clean, fresh water? Everything and everybody! Streams with diverse communities of aquatic insects and crustaceans carry two to eight times less waterborne nitrogen than streams with no aquatic arthropods; they also contain higher levels of dissolved oxygen (Sweeney and Newbold 2014).
”
”
Douglas W. Tallamy (The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees)
“
In the womb, every child is interdependent with its mother’s body. If either of them is sick, the other is affected. In the same way we are interdependent with the body of the earth. The minerals of the soil make up our wheat and our bones, the storm clouds become our drinks and our blood, the oxygen from the trees and forests is the air we breathe. The more consciously we realize this shared destiny, the more compassion arises for the earth itself.
”
”
Jack Kornfield (The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology)
“
Defining various disciplines is a form of creative restraint, binding down natural, outbranching development.
The concept of philosophy is broad. A great many ideas can be found within the love of seeking. It's intended meaning should be synonymous with curiosity. Before the rise of specific fields such as medicine, [in the mediterannean] medicine was a branch stretching around theology and philosophy. The 'love of uncovering' gives birth to specialization and that same force continues in every branch with the same or similar intensity as in the roots and the stem.
A tree should not be restrained, limited, heavily defined. Let it grow freely, unrestrained, limitless, without weight.
Curiosity, is not a field - it may lead to new fields, or improvements therein.
It's not much different from saying a woman should be [exactly] in this way, a man in that way, or a child in this way. It leads to creative authoritarianism, and is a threat to the free growth, cooperation and expansion of various fields.
It's not always necessary to set things in stone.
”
”
Monaristw
“
…so many men are diseased and by that I mean they are dis-eased in their own masculinity. In their desires both homosexual and heterosexual, they are so twisted by it the only answer they have is to try and control literally everyone - women, children, dogs, trees, oxygen, space, other men.
”
”
Jenni Fagan (Luckenbooth)
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In Brazil, the rainforests of the Amazon are being destroyed at an alarming rate by bulldozing and burning. There are many excellent reasons to prevent this continuing – loss of habitat for organisms, production of carbon dioxide from burning trees, destruction of the culture of native Indian tribes, and so on. What is not a good reason, though, is the phrase that is almost inevitably trotted out, to the effect that the rainforests are the ‘lungs of the planet’. The image here is that the ‘civilized’ regions – that is, the industrialized ones – are net producers of carbon dioxide. The pristine rainforest, in contrast, produces a gentle but enormous oxygen breeze, while absorbing the excess carbon dioxide produced by all those nasty people with cars. It must do, surely? A forest is full of plants, and plants produce oxygen. No, they don’t. The net oxygen production of a rainforest is, on average, zero. Trees produce carbon dioxide at night, when they are not photosynthesizing. They lock up oxygen and carbon into sugars, yes – but when they die, they rot, and release carbon dioxide. Forests can indirectly remove carbon dioxide by removing carbon and locking it up as coal or peat, and by releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Ironically, that’s where a lot of the human production of carbon dioxide comes from – we dig it up and burn it again, using up the same amount of oxygen. If the theory that oil is the remains of plants from the carboniferous period is true, then our cars are burning up carbon that was once laid down by plants. Even if an alternative theory, growing in popularity, is true, and oil was produced by bacteria, then the problem remains the same. Either way, if you burn a rainforest you add a one-off surplus of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but you do not also reduce the Earth’s capacity to generate new oxygen. If you want to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide permanently, and not just cut short-term emissions, the best bet is to build up a big library at home, locking carbon into paper, or put plenty of asphalt on roads. These don’t sound like ‘green’ activities, but they are. You can cycle on the roads if it makes you feel better.
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Terry Pratchett (The Science of Discworld (Science of Discworld, #1))
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The first cause of depleted soil is lack of nourishment or ghafla (heedlessness). When our lives lack the water and oxygen of thikr, (remembrance: salah, athkar, Quran), the tree will suffer and cannot grow properly. We will see the result as unhealthy or rotten fruit (actions). The cure is the remembrance of Allah.
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Yasmin Mogahed (Healing the Emptiness: A guide to emotional and spiritual well-being)
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Our current cosmic address is a small flying piece of rubble travelling through an endless black void, surrounded inexplicably by seven other pieces of flying rubble. All of these pieces harmoniously rotate around the same giant fireball without ever crashing into each other, or hurtling themselves into said fireball. And if that isn’t random enough, out of all those pieces of rubble ours is the only one that sustains an environment that gives life to billions of different life forms, including a multitude of flowering plants and oxygen-giving trees, a plethora of wildlife, and eight billion human beings. And somehow, you still genuinely think that magic does not exist, that fairytales aren’t real, that the way people find each other at just the right time at just the right moment isn’t the most powerful sorcery.
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Nikita Gill (Fierce Fairytales: Poems and Stories to Stir Your Soul)
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Yes! Everyone is right. Since everything exists in perspective, our view depends on our version of reality. The negative and positive exist in the same space. I think that we are created in opportunity. We give each other opportunities. Our opportunity may not be limitless, but we never ran out. People give us the opportunity to love. Oxygen gives us the opportunity to breathe. Water gives us the opportunity to swim. Our home was an opportunity provided by trees. We are surrounded by opportunity; but if the world wanted to have opportunity in one tree then it would be limited. We are limited by looking for opportunity in 1. As long as the 1% of anything holds the opportunity, then opportunity will be limited. I learned to find opportunity within myself and attract opportunity from others.
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Dushawn Banks (True Blue)
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She gazed over her oxygen mask at the small, smiling Christmas tree that sat on the table behind her. Tonight, the whirling sound of the disk in the drive was a song that was sweeter than any lullaby.
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Circa24 (Thomas Hardy was an Optimist: A Collection of Short Stories From the Plague Years.)
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When we have the impression that we're all alone and nobody supports us, we can remember that it's only a perception. It's not accurate. Think of a tree standing outside right now. The tree is supporting us with beauty, freshness, and oxygen for us to breathe. That kind of support is also a kind of love. The fresh air outside, the plants that feed us, and the water that flows over our hands from the tap all support.
There are many ways that people can support us and love us without actually saying, "I love you." You may know people who have never said, "I love you," but you know they love you. When I was ordained as a novice monk, I had a teacher who I knew loved me deeply, but he never said, "I love you." That is the traditional way. If one pronounced the words, "I love you," it seemed that some of the sacredness was lost. Sometimes we feel very grateful, but we want to express our gratefulness in ways other than simply saying, "thank you." Look for the many ways people communicate their love without saying it. Maybe, like the tree, they are supporting you in other ways.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (The Art of Communicating)
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In my opinion, faith starts the minute that we stop crying when we are pulled out of our mother’s matrix (womb); the minute that we are in control. When we stop crying we begin to have faith in our surroundings. We begin with faith in oxygen to breathe and faith in our mother’s milk to stop the hunger pains in our stomach. As we get older we begin to have faith in the materials of the world. We have faith in the strength of the trees to build us shelter. We have faith in water to hydrated us, clean us, and carry us when we dive in it. We have faith in fire to keep us warm and cook our food. We have faith in the wind to set our boat’s sail. Our faith grows in materials everyday so we build taller buildings and faster transportation. Using these materials with comfort requires us to have trust in them.
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Dushawn Banks (True Blue)
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Sheikh Gulzar-Ginkgo biloba
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That is a very common misconception, even in the scientific community, except for people who specialize in biology. On Earth today, plants such as trees do generate substantial amounts of free oxygen. However, single-celled organisms utilizing photosynthesis converted Earth's atmosphere billions of years ago, from an anaerobic state, to a state saturated with free oxygen. This was long before the appearance of any land plants; the buildup of free oxygen was delayed by minerals on the surface, such as iron, absorbing the free oxygen until the mineral base became saturated. At that point, we think the free oxygen reduced the amount of methane in Earth's atmosphere. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, so falling methane levels triggered Earth's first ice age. That may be what happened
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Craig Alanson (SpecOps (Expeditionary Force, #2))
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Gurukul are mostly under trees because of sufficient availability of oxygen, so that students can have more focus in learning.
Studies have showed that oxygen stimulate brain activity and help in concentration.-Sasi Krishnasamy
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Sasi Krishnasamy (author of spiritual science)
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And the world stops spinning. And all the oxygen made by every tree in that forest is sucked away, leaving me light-headed. Because I have never seen such a beautiful woman in my life. Not in real life, when I was little. Not in books. Nowhere.
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Katy Regnery (Unloved)
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The fact that changed my life was that somewhere between fifty and seventy percent of the oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere comes from the sea. I had always thought that the forests and the trees and plants around us were responsible for the air we breathe, but they are only a bit player in the oxygen cycle upon which life on this planet depends.
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A.G. Riddle (Quantum Radio)
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There is something to the air here that leads one to compulsive napping. All these trees excrete dangerous levels of oxygen that one can only process in sleep. They have learned that we make better fertilizer for them unconscious.
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Thomm Quackenbush (Holidays with Bigfoot)
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The first quarter mile of the trail was steep, switching back and forth through the ponderosa pine trees, and Wolf’s lungs pumped hard to wring the oxygen out of the Rocky Mountain air. He’d grown up in the mountains, no more than a few miles away, and he was used to the depleted oxygen. But his lungs stung, and the back of his throat tasted like rust. Wolf’s relaxed attitude toward vigorous exercise for the past few months was catching up to him
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Jeff Carson (Foreign Deceit (David Wolf #1))