Swamp Forest Quotes

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country -- its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps.

Thickly forested regions of Phuoc Tuy including the Rung Sat swamps and farms considered to be controlled by the Vietcong, were regularly sprayed by defoliants including “Agent Orange” using aircraft. This was both an inhumane and unsuccessful strategy which only destroyed enough food to feed 245,000 Vietnamese people for a year resulting in a propaganda gift to the Vietcong. (Ham, 2007). Given that defoliation did not uncover the enemy, who kept on fighting from jungle, caves and tunnels, the whole defoliation programme must be considered a failure. Given also, that birth defects and other health problems associated with defoliants can be directly blamed upon “Agent Orange”, it stands to reason that the allies in the Second Indochina War who sprayed it upon villages and farms can in fact be said to be, “Guilty of War Crimes!

[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." Yes? Why is that?" Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]

The mind is a malleable thing. Soil, if you’re feeling poetic. Depending on the seed, anything will grow in it, from graceful gardens to idyllic meadows, from weedy forests to foggy swamps. Harmonious or chaotic, peaceful or perilous, healthy or ill—it’s all a matter of seeds.

You have waged bitter and undeclared war upon the green, gutting the rain forests, mile after mile, day after day, but know this: the war has come home! It is man's turn to embrace the scythe.

Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wander, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, and long-legged birds lift with unexpected grace—as though not built to fly—against the roar of a thousand snow geese. Then within the marsh, here and there, true swamp crawls into low-lying bogs, hidden in clammy forests. Swamp water is still and dark, having swallowed the light in its muddy throat. Even night crawlers are diurnal in this lair. There are sounds, of course, but compared to the marsh, the swamp is quiet because decomposition is cellular work. Life decays and reeks and returns to the rotted duff; a poignant wallow of death begetting life.

Hunger attacks me," said Zarathustra, "like a robber. Among forests and swamps my hunger attacks me, and late in the night.

Somebody betrayed us... The Germans learned the location of our partisan troop. They surrounded the forest from all sides. We were hiding in the deep woods, hiding in the swamps where the torturers did not go [...] A radio operator was with us. She gave birth recently. The baby was hungry... Wanting the breast... But the mother is starving, she has no milk, and the baby is crying. The Germans are nearby... With dogs... If the dogs hear the baby, we're all dead. All of us - thirty people... Do you understand? We make a decision... Nobody dares to tell her the commader's order, but the mother guesses it herself. She puts the bundle with the baby into the water and holds it there for a long time... The baby does not cry... Not a sound... And we cannot lift our eyes. We cannot look at the mother or at each other

LADY CROOM: ....My lake is drained to a ditch for no purpose I can understand, unless it be that snipe and curlew have deserted three counties so that they may be shot in our swamp. What you painted as forest is a mean plantation, your greenery is mud, your waterfall is wet mud, and your mount is an opencast mine for the mud that was lacking in the dell. (Pointing through the window) What is that cowshed? NOAKES: The hermitage, my lady? LADY CROOM: It is a cowshed. NOAKES: It is, I assure you, a very habitable cottage, properly founded and drained, two rooms and a closet under a slate roof and a stone chimney -- LADY CROOM: And who is to live in it? NOAKES: Why, the hermit. LADY CROOM: Where is he? NOAKES: Madam? LADY CROOM: You surely do not supply an hermitage without a hermit? NOAKES: Indeed, madam -- LADY CROOM: Come, come, Mr Noakes. If I am promised a fountain I expect it to come with water. What hermits do you have? NOAKES: I have no hermits, my lady. LADY CROOM: Not one? I am speechless. NOAKES: I am sure a hermit can be found. One could advertise. LADY CROOM: Advertise? NOAKES: In the newspapers. LADY CROOM: But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people—the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California’s shore, at the end of the open road. Shine, perishing republic.

The Tyrannosaurus rex was a creature of the jungle. She lived in the deepest forests and swamps of North America, not long after it had broken off from the ancient continent of Laurasia. Her territory encompassed more than five hundred square miles, and it stretched from the shores of the ancient Niobrara inland sea to the foothills of the newly minted Rocky Mountains.

In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: “You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother’s hand, who is holding her mother’s hand. . . . ” Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor looks like that of a chimpanzee. I loved picturing one of Octavia’s arms stretching out to meet one of her mother’s arms, and one of her mother’s mother’s arms, and her mother’s mother’s mother’s. . . . Suckered, elastic arms, reaching back through time: an octopus chorus line stretching not just hundreds, but many thousands of miles long. Back past the Cenozoic, the time when our ancestors descended from the trees; back past the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs ruled the land; back past the Permian and the rise of the ancestors of the mammals; back, past the Carboniferous’s coal-forming swamp forests; back past the Devonian, when amphibians emerged from the water; back past the Silurian, when plants first took root on land—all the way to the Ordovician, to a time before the advent of wings or knees or lungs, before the fishes had bony jaws, before blood pumped from a multichambered heart. More than 500 million years ago, the tides would have been stronger, the days shorter, the year longer, and the air too high in carbon dioxide for mammals or birds to breathe. All the earth’s continents huddled in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet still, the arm of Octavia’s ancestor, sensitive, suckered, and supple, would have been recognizable as one of an octopus.

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat.

In reference to the search for Lincoln's killers as it took to the Maryland swamps: "The method of searching the swamps is simple yet arduous. First, the troops assemble on the edge of bogs with names like Allen’s Creek, Scrub Swamp, and Atchall’s Swamp, standing at loose attention in the shade of a thick forest of beech, dogwood, and gum trees. Then they form two lines and march straight forward, from one side to the other. As absurd as it seems to the soldiers, marching headlong into cold mucky water, there is no other way of locating Booth and Herold. Incredibly, eighty-seven of these brave men will drown in their painstaking weeklong search for the killers.

Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too much dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

Indonesia’s richly complex wooded peatlands where entrepreneurs log, burn and plow to make palm oil plantations are one of the saddest examples of great biological loss. In shops and stores I read labels and when I find bars of soap made with palm oil I get a mental image of a ravaged forest. I do not buy that soap.

A first meeting. A meeting in the desert, a meeting at sea, meeting in the city, meeting at night, meeting at a grave, meeting in the sunshine beside the forest, beside water. Human beings meet, yet the meetings are not the same. Meeting partakes in its very essence not only of the persons but of the place of meeting. And that essence of place remains, and colours, faintly, the association, perhaps forever. Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990 (page 95).

Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden frothing of pink peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills. Already the plowing was nearly finished, and the bloody glory of the sunset colored the fresh-cut furrows of red Georgia clay to even redder hues. The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet and maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches. The whitewashed brick plantation house seemed an island set in a wild red sea, a sea of spiraling, curving, crescent billows petrified suddenly at the moment when the pink-tipped waves were breaking into surf. For here were no long, straight furrows, such as could be seen in the yellow clay fields of the flat middle Georgia country or in the lush black earth of the coastal plantations. The rolling foothill country of north Georgia was plowed in a million curves to keep the rich earth from washing down into the river bottoms. It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts, the best cotton land in the world. It was a pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers, but a land of contrasts, of brightest sun glare and densest shade. The plantation clearings and miles of cotton fields smiled up to a warm sun, placid, complacent. At their edges rose the virgin forests, dark and cool even in the hottest noons, mysterious, a little sinister, the soughing pines seeming to wait with an age-old patience, to threaten with soft sighs: "Be careful! Be careful! We had you once. We can take you back again.

A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burnt-out bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …” “I get it,” said Noonan. “A roadside picnic.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre.

And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees.

Big Brown Moose I'm a big brown moose, I'm a rascally moose, I'm a moose with a tough, shaggy hide; and I kick and I prance in a long-legged dance with my moose-mama close by my side. I shrug off the cold and I sneeze at the wind and I swivel my ears in the snow; and I tramp and I tromp over forest and swamp, 'cause there's nowhere a moose cannot go. I'm a big brown moose, I'm a ravenous moose as I hunt for the willow and yew; with a snort and a crunch, I rip off each bunch, and I chew and I chew and I chew. When together we slump in a comfortable clump -- my mountainous mama and I -- I give her a nuzzle of velvety muzzle. Our frosty breath drifts to the sky. I'm a big brown moose, I'm a slumberous moose, I'm a moose with a warm, snuggly hide; and I bask in the moon as the coyotes croon, with my moose-mama close by my side.

our goods and money are consumed by taxation; our land is stripped of its harvest to fill their granaries; our hands and limbs are crippled by building roads through forests and swamps under the lash of our oppressors’.

Those who do not know the conditions of mountains and forests, hazardous defiles, marshes and swamps, cannot conduct the march of an army. Those who do not use local guides are unable to obtain the advantages of the ground.

Here come warm gusts of decomposing leaves, of rotting vegetation. We are in a swamp now; in a malarial jungle. There is an elephant white with maggots, killed by an arrow shot dead in its eye. The bright eyes of hopping-birds—eagles, vultures—are apparent. They take us for fallen trees. They pick at a worm—that is a hooded cobra—and leave it with a festering brown scar to be mauled by lions. This is our world, lit with crescents and stars of light; and great petals half transparent block the openings like purple windows. Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.

I don't hate you," I tell her. And I honestly don't. Because love can't be faked when magic's involved. Ivy didn't push me out of the way just to gain a soul. She didn't force anything. It was all her choice to save and love me. From her wide eyes, she can't believe what I've said. "Rea-really?" "Yeah." I grin despite the waterworks. "Because I know you love me. Just like I love you." "I do," whispers Ivy. A single tear escapes her eye. "I love you, Rylan. And thank you for letting me hear that...once in my lifetime."

The breath of song in your remembering eyes cascades fragile reflections of time-steeped sunsets tinting delicate snowflakes with the solitude of a sleeping forest where ancient secrets lie waiting, undisturbed by knowing, tranquil in the forgetfulness of yesterday's silvery silence  

What—in other words—would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death. There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think of it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents—whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species—all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realiza-tion, of the realization of eternal human desires or fantasies, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence—one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer—has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!

What is the natural environment of the rhesus monkey? Human beings are the only primate more broadly distributed across the globe than the rhesus macaque, these nomads who have traveled across land and over water, who can live as well on a four-thousand-foot mountain as in a tropical forest or a mangrove swamp.

Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are you done?” “Almost,” Harding said. “Hang on.” “And believe me, it’ll be fast. If you map complex systems on a fitness landscape, you find the behavior can move so fast that fitness can drop precipitously. It doesn’t require asteroids or diseases or anything else. It’s just behavior that suddenly emerges, and turns out to be fatal to the creatures that do it. My idea was that dinosaurs—being complex creatures—might have undergone some of these behavioral changes. And that led to their extinction.

Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him,—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible…

All at once he found his mind drawing a parallel between that destiny and his own existence; all at once questions of life arose before his vision, like owls in an ancient ruin flushed from sleep by a stray ray of sunlight. Somehow he felt pained and grieved at his arrested development, at the check which had taken place in his moral growth, at the weight which appeared to be pressing upon his every faculty. Also gnawing at his heart there was a sense of envy that others should be living a life so full and free, while all the time the narrow, pitiful little pathway of his own existence was being blocked by a great boulder. And in his hesitating soul there arose a torturing consciousness that many sides of his nature had never yet been stirred, that others had never even been touched, and that not one of them had attained complete formation. Yet with this there went an aching suspicion that, buried in his being, as in a tomb, there still remained a moribund element of sweetness and light, and that it was an element which, though hidden in his personality, as a nugget lies lurking in the bowels of the earth, might once have become minted into sterling coin. But the treasure was now overlaid with rubbish--was now thickly littered over with dust. 'Twas as though some one had stolen from him, and besmirched, the store of gifts with which life and the world had dowered him; so that always he would be prevented from entering life's field and sailing across it with the aid of intellect and of will. Yes, at the very start a secret enemy had laid a heavy hand upon him and diverted him from the road of human destiny. And now he seemed to be powerless to leave the swamps and wilds in favour of that road. All around him was a forest, and ever the recesses of his soul were growing dimmer and darker, and the path more and more tangled, while the consciousness of his condition kept awaking within him less and less frequently--to arouse only for a fleeting moment his slumbering faculties. Brain and volition alike had become paralysed, and, to all appearances, irrevocably--the events of his life had become whittled down to microscopical proportions. Yet even with them he was powerless to cope--he was powerless to pass from one of them to another. Consequently they bandied him to and fro like the waves of the ocean. Never was he able to oppose to any event elasticity of will; never was he able to conceive, as the result of any event, a reasoned-out impulse. Yet to confess this, even to himself, always cost him a bitter pang: his fruitless regrets for lost opportunities, coupled with burning reproaches of conscience, always pricked him like needles, and led him to strive to put away such reproaches and to discover a scapegoat.

Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre.

The chokecherries -- gregarious and chatty, perched on their branches calling out to everyone to strip them off. Wild plums -- sarcastic and timid at the same time -- called out from behind their leaves only to retreat into the brushy brambles where they lived. Raspberries and blackberries -- royal and corrupt princes -- braved it out in the full sun of forest clearings. Gooseberries and huckleberries -- reticent, tradition-bound and private -- lived on unbothered in the swamps. Cranberries and pincherries (those party-goers) draped themselves over the furniture of the branches and invited all passerby, birds and people, to join the party. The blueberries and wintergreen grew undisturbed -- calmly bourgeois -- in the carpeted hush of the big woods.

We reject capitalism because it is abusive. Because it’s a system that argues: as long as the oligarchy is profiting, no atrocity is too grave, no violation too gross. Slavery, genocide, atomic war, swamps drained, forests burned, animals brought to extinction. Nothing is out of bounds and there are always plenty of reasons why it has to be this way… free market, forked tongue.

One ignorant of the plans of neighboring states cannot prepare alliances in good time; if ignorant of the conditions of mountains, forests, dangerous defiles, swamps and marshes he cannot conduct the march of an army; if he fails to make use of native guides he cannot gain the advantages of the ground. A general ignorant of even one of these three matters is unfit to command the armies of a Hegemonic King.

In the relative cool of the timber stands, possum grapes and muscadine flourish with a cynical fecundity, and the floor of the forest — littered with old mossbacked logs, peopled with toadstools strange and solemn among the ferns and creepers and leaning to show their delicate livercolored gills — has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep.

In the night the eyes are partly closed, or retire into the head. Other senses take the lead. The walker is guided as well by the sense of smell. Every plant and field and forest emits its odor now, —swamp-pink in the meadow, and tansy in the road; and there is the peculiar dry scent of corn which has begun to show its tassels. The senses both of hearing and smelling are more alert. We hear the tinkling of rills which we never detected before.

When I wish to recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place — a sanctum sanctorum ....A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,— such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages.

RYLAN!" I feel Ivy's palm on my chest and, with a powerful shove, she pushes me back, away from fire, danger, and death. In that moment after the tree plunges, I see Ivy for a single second as I fall. In those emerald eyes is a look of complete calm, undying gratitude, and powerful, protective love. The tree crashes down, the sound echoing in my head. For an eternal moment, I sit there on my butt, staring at the spot where Ivy was standing. I'm numb, only registering the slightest changes; the wind dying down, the rain lessening. What just happened? Desperately, I look side to side, praying that Ivy jumped to the side and what I saw was just an illusion made up by my panicked mind. But Ivy's nowhere. And there's an arm sticking out from under the trunk. "IVY!" I sprint to the fallen tree. The smoldering wood stings my hand when I grab the trunk, but I grit my teeth and bear it. Pulling with all my might, I throw the remains of the tree aside. Ivy's lying there, her eyes closed and her lower half on fire. "No..." I fall to my knees and yank off my sweatshirt to try and smother the flames, but they burn strong, and soon the fabric's on fire. I toss it away, not knowing where it lands as I'm unable to tear my eyes off the most gut-wrenching sight of my life. My hands go to my head and my shouting grows even louder. "No, no, no!" This can't be happening. She can't be—

This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are

In the deep woods of the far North, under feathery leaves of fern, was a great fairyland of merry elves, sometimes called forest brownies. These elves lived joyfully. They had everything at hand and did not need to worry much about living. Berries and nuts grew plentiful in the forest. Rivers and springs provided the elves with crystal water. Flowers prepared them drink from their flavorful juices, which the munchkins loved greatly. At midnight the elves climbed into flower cups and drank drops of their sweet water with much delight. Every elf would tell a wonderful fairy tale to the flower to thank it for the treat. Despite this abundance, the pixies did not sit back and do nothing. They tinkered with their tasks all day long. They cleaned their houses. They swung on tree branches and swam in forested streams. Together with the early birds, they welcomed the sunrise, listened to the thunder growling, the whispering of leaves and blades of grass, and the conversations of the animals. The birds told them about warm countries, sunbeams whispered of distant seas, and the moon spoke of treasures hidden deeply in the earth. In winter, the elves lived in abandoned nests and hollows. Every sunny day they came out of their burrows and made the forest ring with their happy shouts, throwing tiny snowballs in all directions and building snowmen as small as the pinky finger of a little girl. The munchkins thought they were giants five times as large as them. With the first breath of spring, the elves left their winter residences and moved to the cups of the snowdrop flowers. Looking around, they watched the snow as it turned black and melted. They kept an eye on the blossoming of hazel trees while the leaves were still sleeping in their warm buds. They observed squirrels moving their last winter supplies from storage back to their homes. Gnomes welcomed the birds coming back to their old nests, where the elves lived during winters. Little by little, the forest once more grew green. One moonlight night, elves were sitting at an old willow tree and listening to mermaids singing about their underwater kingdom. “Brothers! Where is Murzilka? He has not been around for a long time!” said one of the elves, Father Beardie, who had a long white beard. He was older than others and well respected in his striped stocking cap. “I’m here,” a snotty voice arose, and Murzilka himself, nicknamed Feather Head, jumped from the top of the tree. All the brothers loved Murzilka, but thought he was lazy, as he actually was. Also, he loved to dress in a tailcoat, tall black hat, boots with narrow toes, a cane and a single eyeglass, being very proud of that look. “Do you know where I’m coming from? The very Arctic Ocean!” roared he. Usually, his words were hard to believe. That time, though, his announcement sounded so marvelous that all elves around him were agape with wonder. “You were there, really? Were you? How did you get there?” asked the sprites. “As easy as ABC! I came by the fox one day and caught her packing her things to visit her cousin, a silver fox who lives by the Arctic Ocean. “Take me with you,” I said to the fox. “Oh, no, you’ll freeze there! You know, it’s cold there!” she said. “Come on.” I said. “What are you talking about? What cold? Summer is here.” “Here we have summer, but there they have winter,” she answered. “No,” I thought. “She must be lying because she does not want to give me a ride.” Without telling her a word, I jumped upon her back and hid in her bushy fur, so even Father Frost could not find me. Like it or not, she had to take me with her. We ran for a long time. Another forest followed our woods, and then a boundless plain opened, a swamp covered with lichen and moss. Despite the intense heat, it had not entirely thawed. “This is tundra,” said my fellow traveler. “Tundra? What is tundra?” asked I. “Tundra is a huge, forever frozen wetland covering the entire coast of the Arctic Ocean.

A blue preacher flew toward the swamp, in slow motion. On the leafy banks, an old Chinese poet, hunched in the white gown of his wings, was waiting. The water was the kind of dark silk that has silver lines shot through it when it is touched by the wind or is splashed upward, in a small, quick flower, by the life beneath it. The preacher made his difficult landing, his skirts up around his knees. The poet's eyes flared, just as poet's eyes are said to do when a poet is awakened from the forest of meditation. It was summer. It was only a few moments past sun's rising, which meant the whole day lay before them. They greeted each other, rumpling their gowns for an instant, and then smoothing them. They entered the water, and instantly two more herons - equally as beautiful - joined them and stood just beneath them in the black, polished water where they fished all day. "Some Herons" by Mary Oliver

—You know, I’m no patriot, but I love my countrymen. A country, a fatherland, there’s something abstract about that. But a countryman is something concrete. I can’t possibly love every wheat and maize field, every pine forest, every swamp, every Polish lady and gentleman, but show me one field, one copse, one swamp, one individual, well, 'à la bonheur'! That’s something I can see and understand, that speaks to me in a language I am familiar with, that — because of its singularity — can be dear to me. And beyond that, there are persons I term my countrymen, even if they happen to have been born in China or Persia or Africa. Some are dear to me from the moment I first clap eyes on them. A true ‘countryman is immediately identifiable. And if he happens to be someone from my own patch as well, then, as I say, 'à la bonheur'! But there’s an element of chance there, the other is simple providence. He raised his glass, and called out: —Here’s to my countrymen, wherever they happen to hail from!

I’m talking about all the order in the natural world,” Malcolm said. “And how perhaps it can emerge fast, through crystallization. Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh,

"Ry-Rylan?" Ivy's voice is faint. I crawl over to her side, my eyes never once straying from hers. "Rylan?" "I'm here," I whisper, stroking her forehead with tenderness. "I'm here, and I'm not leaving you." She grins weakly. The light in her eyes is starting to slowly fade. "Thank you. I wish I could say the same...for me." "Don't say that," I beg. "You're not going to die. I'll get some water, out the fire out, and everything will be fine—" Ivy places her hand on mine. "Water will not stop it. Once it starts, the fire will keep going. See how it spreads?" She's right. In these few moments the flames have spread up to her waist, licking her body with searing tongues. Something glows. Glancing down, I see Ivy healing my burned palms. Once she's done, she places her hand on my bloody shoulder and heals that too. "There," she murmurs, letting her hand drop. "You are all healed. My last gift to you." "You can't leave," I whisper, more to myself than anyone else. Tears prick my eyes. "You can't leave." "We all have to leave sometimes," Ivy muses, so calm in the face of death. "Even swamp angels."

It takes no skill to find a bald eagle. You look for flat rabbits on country roads. Wait a while and the national emblem will appear, menace anything that got there first, and plunge his majestic head deep in a mass of entrails. Alternatively, you can follow some industrious hawk through swamp or bottomland forest until he dispatches a squirrel; an eagle is likely to descend, savage the smaller bird, and steal his prize. The eagle can hunt, of course; he just prefers not to. Benjamin Franklin called him a bird of bad moral character. It takes no skill to find the nest, either. Look for a shipwreck in a tree, layered in feces . . . The likeliest impediment to (the eagles’) reproductive success was a human observer bungling around twice a day, but their welfare was almost incidental anyway. The point was for patriotic human hearts to swell with pride on outdoor weekends, and convincing replicas would have sufficed; the compulsive monitoring was not good husbandry, just an expression of national guilt. I did what I was paid for. Privately I sided with the furred and feathered residents of the area who must have wondered why humans were loosing winged hyenas in their midst . . . They’re glorified vultures. An apex predator that never hunts. Absurd.

If monks had only been ascetic and eccentric in their behavior, however, they would not have won the devotion and admiration of the people in the way they did. Thus, secondly, their exemplary lifestyle made a profound impact, particularly on the peasants. Their conduct was epitomized in the words of the Celtic monk Columban (543–615), “He who says he believes in Christ ought to walk as Christ walked, poor and humble and always preaching the truth” (quoted in Baker 1970:28). The monks were poor, and they worked incredibly hard; they plowed, hedged, drained morasses, cleared away forests, did carpentry, thatched, and built roads and bridges. “They found a swamp, a moor, a thicket, a rock, and they made an Eden in the wilderness” (Newman 1970:398). Even secular historians acknowledge that the agricultural restoration of the largest part of Europe has to be attributed to them (:399). Through their disciplined and tireless labor they turned the tide of barbarism in Western Europe and brought back into cultivation the lands which had been deserted and depopulated in the age of the invasions. More important, through their sanctifying work and poverty they lifted the hearts of the poor and neglected peasants and inspired them while at the same time revolutionizing the order of social values which had dominated the empire's slave-owning society (cf Dawson 1950:56f).

The marsh was guarded by a torn shoreline, labeled by early explorers as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” because riptides, furious winds, and shallow shoals wrecked ships like paper hats along what would become the North Carolina coast. One seaman’s journal read, “rang’d along the Shoar . . . but could discern no Entrance . . . A violent Storm overtook us . . . we were forced to get off to Sea, to secure Ourselves and Ship, and were driven by the Rapidity of a strong Current . . . “The Land . . . being marshy and Swamps, we return’d towards our Ship . . . Discouragement of all such as should hereafter come into those Parts to settle.” Those looking for serious land moved on, and this infamous marsh became a net, scooping up a mishmash of mutinous sailors, castaways, debtors, and fugitives dodging wars, taxes, or laws that they didn’t take to. The ones malaria didn’t kill or the swamp didn’t swallow bred into a woodsmen tribe of several races and multiple cultures, each of whom could fell a small forest with a hatchet and pack a buck for miles. Like river rats, each had his own territory, yet had to fit into the fringe or simply disappear some day in the swamp. Two hundred years later, they were joined by runaway slaves, who escaped into the marsh and were called maroons, and freed slaves, penniless and beleaguered, who dispersed into the water-land because of scant options.

authorities were less vigilant during a storm. Even so, he was nervous. He had flown in to Cuba many times. But never here. And tonight he would have preferred to have been going almost anywhere else. Cayo Esqueleto. Skeleton Key. There it was, stretching out before him, twenty-five miles long and six miles across at its widest point. The sea around it, which had been an extraordinary, brilliant blue until a few minutes ago, had suddenly darkened, as if someone had thrown a switch. Over to the west, he made out the twinkling lights of Puerto Madre, the island’s second-biggest town. The main airport was farther north, outside the capital of Santiago. But that wasn’t where he was heading. He pressed down on the joystick and the plane veered to the right, circling over the forests and mangrove swamps that surrounded the old, abandoned airport at the bottom end of the island. The Cessna had been equipped with a thermal intensifier, similar to the sort used in American spy satellites. He flicked a switch and glanced at the display. A few birds appeared as tiny pinpricks of red. More dots pulsated in the swamp: crocodiles or perhaps manatees. And a single dot about twenty yards from the runway. He turned to speak to the man called Carlo, but there was no need. Carlo was already leaning over his shoulder, staring at the screen. Carlo nodded. Only one man was waiting for them, as agreed. Anyone hiding within half a mile of the airstrip would have shown up on the radar. It was safe to land.

This night is going well. "Hello there." I speak too soon. Dunstan enters, his two cronies behind him. Everyone standing around goes quiet. I flinch, but not for me; he's gazing at Ivy like a lion at a piece of meat. Ivy just keeps grinning. "And may I say you are the prettiest girl I've seen all night," Dunstan says, not noticing the fact Ivy's already taken. Ivy stares down at her feet, a pale blush the color of pink roses brushed across her cheeks. "You don't mean that," she whispers, not knowing she's accidentally flirting. "I really do," Dunstan continues in his oily, supposedly charming voice, and I roll my eyes. I want to pull Ivy away, but if I do, Dunstan will notice me. And without Melanie breathing down his neck, who knows what he'll try to pull? "So what's your name, beautiful?" Ivy blush deepens and i feel my nails dig into my skin. I'm the one whose supposed to tell her she's pretty, not this jerk. "My name is Ivy," Ivy replies. "Ivy. I like it. It suits you." I feel an arm on my shoulder and turning around, I see Aidan holding me back. Unconsciously, I've stepped forward, ready to challenge him. "So what is your name?" Ivy asks, still shyly peering down at her shoeless feet. Acting all surprised he got asked this, Dunstan runs a hand through his hair. "My name is Dunstan." Ivy's flush instantly vanishes, the corners of her mouth turns down, and her eyebrows knit together. "Dunstan? This is your name?" Quiet as she's being, I know there's anger there. I'd hate to be the recipient of this tone. But Dunstan the egotistical baboon butt isn't aware of the change. "Yep, that's me." "What is your last name?" I feel someone shaking. Aidan's still hanging on to me, and he's nervous, too. Dunstan still doesn't detect her malice. "Why, my last name's Lebelle. Dunstan Lebelle." He chuckles. "Perhaps you've heard of me?" "Oh yes," Ivy hisses, suddenly radiating ferocious fury. "I've heard much about the boy who nearly got Rylan Forester killed." Even with blaring music in the next room, you can hear a pin drop throughout the kitchen as everyone goes quiet, having lost all ability to talk due to flapping jaws. Someone whistles. "Excuse me?" Dunstan sounds like he can't believe what he's hearing. "You heard me." Ivy glares, knowing she has him caught. "You pushed Rylan into the swamp where the alligator attacked him. Sure, you can blame the alligator, but when you really think about, if you had not pushed him in, Rylan wouldn't have nearly died. Who, by the way," Ivy steps back, clasping my free hand in hers, "happens to be my friend and my date." Everyone bursts into titters—no one has ever spoken to Dustan Lebelle like that—as Dunstan stares at me wide-eyed, finally taking in my existence. But before he can do anything, Ivy pulls my hand. "We're leaving," she declares, giving Dunstan one last stink eye. And with her nose in the air and me following, Ivy boldly walks right out the back door.

In respect to the employment of troops, ground may be classified as dispersive, frontier, key, communicating, focal, serious, difficult, encircled, and death. When a feudal lord fights in his own territory, he is in dispersive ground. Here officers and men long to return to their nearby homes. When he makes but a shallow penetration into enemy territory he is in frontier ground. Ground equally advantageous for the enemy or me to occupy is key ground. Ground equally accessible to both the enemy and me is communicating. This is level and extensive ground in which one may come and go, sufficient in extent for battle and to erect opposing fortifications. When a state is enclosed by three other states its territory is focal. He who first gets control of it will gain the support of All-under-Heaven. When the army has penetrated deep into hostile territory, leaving far behind many enemy cities and towns, it is in serious ground. When the army traverses mountains, forests, precipitous country, or marches through defiles, marshlands, or swamps, or any place where the going is hard, it is in difficult ground. Ground to which access is constricted, where the way out is tortuous, and where a small enemy force can strike my larger one is called 'encircled.' Ground in which the army survives only if it fights with the courage of desperation is called 'death.' Therefore, do not fight in dispersive ground; do not stop in the frontier borderlands. Do not attack an enemy who occupies key ground; in communicating ground do not allow your formations to become separated. In focal ground, ally with neighboring states; in deep ground, plunder. In difficult ground, press on; in encircled ground, devise stratagems; in death ground, fight. In dispersive ground I would unify the determination of the army. In frontier ground I would keep my forces closely linked. In key ground I would hasten up my rear elements. In communicating ground I would pay strict attention to my defenses. In focal ground I would strengthen my alliances. I reward my prospective allies with valuables and silks and bind them with solemn covenants. I abide firmly by the treaties and then my allies will certainly aid me. In serious ground I would ensure a continuous flow of provisions. In difficult ground I would press on over the roads. In encircled ground I would block the points of access and egress. It is military doctrine that an encircling force must leave a gap to show the surrounded troops there is a way out, so that they will not be determined to fight to the death. Then, taking advantage of this, strike. Now, if I am in encircled ground, and the enemy opens a road in order to tempt my troops to take it, I close this means of escape so that my officers and men will have a mind to fight to the death. In death ground I could make it evident that there is no chance of survival. For it is the nature of soldiers to resist when surrounded; to fight to the death when there is no alternative, and when desperate to follow commands implicitly.

Permanent Revolution THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.1 Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the resources available to humankind are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. That’s why doomsday prophesies of resource scarcity are probably misplaced. In contrast, the fear of ecological degradation is only too well founded. The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction. In fact, ecological turmoil might endanger the survival of Homo sapiens itself. Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters. As humans use their power to counter the forces of nature and subjugate the ecosystem to their needs and whims, they might cause more and more unanticipated and dangerous side effects. These are likely to be controllable only by even more drastic manipulations of the ecosystem, which would result in even worse chaos. Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid. Still, the rumours of our own extinction are premature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens.

Just in front of her lay the Congaree Swamp National Forest. To prove it, a mosquito the size of a kitten landed on her arm and prepared to drill.

Rylan!" Melanie squeals, high-pitched enough to break glass. "I'm, like, so sorry I haven't talked to you all night. Being a hostess is hard work." She dramatically wipes imaginary sweat off her forehead. "Anyway, I finally have some free time. So why don't we go dance, hmm?" Gripping my waist a little too tightly for my taste, she tries to pull me back to the house. I stand strong., jerking Melanie back when I don't move. "No thanks, Melanie." My free arm tightens around Ivy's waist. "I already am dancing with someone." Melanie's sight flickers to Ivy, and for a moment contempt skews her big grin. But it's gone in an instant as Melanie stretches her fake smile to the point she's showing gums and asks, through gritted teeth, "Hi. What's your name?" Ivy can tell there's something off with the girl in front of her, but she still gives her a polite greeting. "Hello. My name is Ivy. How do you do?" Melanie completely ignores the question and turns back to me. "You never told me you invited someone else, Rylan." Melanie's smile goes harsh. "I'm sorry, but unless I give the okay, no one outside of school is invited." She glares at Ivy. "I'll have to ask you to leave." Ivy tilts her head, befuddled at the sudden hostility. "You want me to go?" Melanie rolls her eyes. "Uh, yeah. I just said that." Ivy stares down at her feet, ashamed and no doubt guilty for the wrong reason. She nods. "Okay." She begins to leave but I grab her wrist and pull her back against me. I glare at Melanie. "What if I don't want her to go?" I growl. "Yeah, Melanie!" To my relief, I see Aidan and Nadia wiggle through the crowd. Neither of them look very happy; Nadia's downright fuming. Despite the whole "my liking Ivy" case, she's still there for me. "Don't go telling people they can't be here," Nadia growls, her eyes flashing dangerously. "Who died and made you think you can boss everyone around?" "Last time I checked, this is my party, and therefore I choose who I invite or not," declares Melanie with an obvious edge in her voice. "That's no excuse! The only reason you want her gone is so you can make Rylan your new boy toy, which he doesn't want!" "Oh, like you know him so well?" "I'm his best friend, bitch!" " Excuse me!?" "ENOUGH!" With one word, I bring the argument to an end and all attention back on me. "Nadia's right," I state, glowering at Melanie. "Nadia's always been right. You know one of the reasons I came, other than to show Ivy a good time? It was to tell you to leave me alone, okay? I. Don't. Like. You. So leave me alone!" It was like I announced I farted. Everyone starts whispering with disbelief. No one has ever turned down the advances of Melanie Sweet—until now. It's turning into a night of first for them. Melanie obviously isn't used to this, as her face reddens like a tomato, her beautifully manicured hands clench into fists, and her usually angelic face morphs into a full-blown snarl. How sweet.

I gently pull on Ivy's hand. Let's go," I tell Ivy, who, despite it all, still looks calm and poised. She nods and we walk away towards the back door, skirting around people and the rim of the pool. I realize how stupid it is when it's too late. "You WHORE!" Melanie is a blur of motion. I feel Ivy's hand leave mine and she shrieks. I spin around and watch as she falls back. Right in the direction of the pool.

Does it hurt?" "My magic...takes away most of the pain. I feel nothing. But Rylan?" "Yeah?" "Kiss me. Please. One last feeling." Heat tickles my chin as I lean down and grant Ivy her final request. I kiss her like I don't want to let her go, hard and soft and urgent and slow until we both need air.

"I...love you...Rylan. But do not fear...I'll be seeing you...again...I am...forever watching..." She breathes her last. The fire races across her face and through her hair. I watch as she lifted up with the rising smoke.

Nadia...first, I'm flattered you like me. You're a wonderful girl, and I'm lucky that I met you. You're one of my best friends, my only friends. And since that night with Ivy, you've been amazing. You and your brother have truly been there when I needed you to be." I sigh. "Maybe if things had stayed normal—if I never got attacked, if I never met Ivy—I may have been able to return your feelings. But now...right now, I need a friend more than a girlfriend to help me get through this." Nadia didn't look very happy, but she nodded; she understood. "You really liked her, didn't you?" There was no doubt about my answer. "Yeah. I did. I still do. And I will for the rest of my life.

As I came closer, it took shape: long, slender, and curling, with numerous heart-shaped leaves. I felt my soul leap inside me. For Ivy's tree was now hung with her namesake. Jade-green ivy clutched the bark with such strength that, no matter how hard you pulled, it would never let go. I know I started crying then. My friends came to my side at once, patting my back and telling me that everything was going to be okay. And though the tears kept coming, I knew they were right. Everything was really going to be fine now. Because here, in front of me, was something I'd been hoping and praying for. I'd been searching for a sign, a signal to give me comfort in Ivy's passing and to tell me she was okay. And at last, here it was, growing all around me.

I'll never see Ivy alive again. But she's still everywhere. In every drop of bubbling swamp water. In every leaf hanging from every tree. In every speck of swamp mud. In every blade of grass. In every gift she left behind for me: two sacks of miscellaneous objects, a grass bracelet, her home, her love, and my life. A swamp angel named Ivy lived in my backyard. And now she doesn't. But wherever she is, I know she's watching me. Just like the angel she's always been.

RYLAN!" The yell comes out of nowhere and nearly gives me a heart attack. Tearing my eyes away, I watch as Babette comes crashing through the undergrowth. With no regard that I might be severely injured, she bounds over and grabs me in a bear hug. "Rylan! Oh my God, Rylan," Babette whimpers. She gently rocks me like I'm five years old again. There are some more footsteps, and Aidan and Nadia soon appear. Relief fills both their faces, with Nadia crying happily on Aidan's shoulder. Just as I think she's going to crush me, Babette finally pulls back, her face shiny with tears. "Rylan, I thought I'd lost you. I thought I was never going to see you again. I—" I hold up a hand. "Babette, it's okay. I'm alive. Not perfect, but I'm alive." I gesture to my leg. "Holy crap!" the twins say together, staring at my leg in horror and disgust. It only takes one glance for Nadia to really start sobbing. "Nadia! Nadia...don't cry," I murmur in an attempt to comfort her. Since she's such a happy person most of the time it hurts to see her like this. "It'll heal up. It's fine." "B-but it-it's horrible! You near-nearly drowned an-and now you're hurt!" Aidan pulls her into an awkward hug, trying to calm her down.

Oh, no you don't. You're not heading down to that dock, young man," Babette declares as she clears my plate. "But Babette, Dr. Felix said I only had to rest yesterday!" "Yes he did, and I won't make you stay in bed today. But you're going to stay here while I go. I don't think your crutches are able to make it down the path. It's too rough. You'll end up tripping over something." I scoff. She doesn't know that I'm the guy who not only made it down to the dock, but also did it in the dark WITHOUT falling flat on his back. "But Babette—" "No buts, Rylan. You're staying here and that's final" "Fine," I grumble.

You're one to talk about talking crap, Forester." Dunstan's voice interrupts the memory, and I can't help but feel a little grateful. "Accusing my dad of poisoning the swamp? What a bunch of bull." "It's not bull,"I snarl. "Your dad's dumping trash into the swamp and you know it!" Dunstan finally loses it and stands up. The boat tilts dangerously. Melanie and the twins shriek, grasping the sides like they're glued to them. "You two sit down this minute!" Babette bellows. She's holding onto the motor for dear life. Neither of us listens. "You wanna run that by me again?" Dunstan growls. His fingers curl into fists. "Your. Dad. Is. Poisoning. The. Swamp." I let each word out slowly like Dunstan's a dumb little kid who needs help understanding.

Get me in here. Get me in here now!" I order. I have to get out of the swamp before it happens again. But it does. I feel it before I see it. Dozens of thick, razor-sharp needles pierce my right leg, sinking into my skin. It hurts like nothing I've felt before, and a strangled scream of pain escapes me. Babette whips her head around, the motor forgotten. "Rylan! What is it!" "Get me out! GET ME OUT!" I scream. Fearfully, I look over my shoulder, but seconds later I wish I hadn't as the attacker comes to the surface. It has a scaly body, sharp claws, feral eyes, and a long, ugly, sneering snout that's clamped around my leg. Melanie identifies it with a shriek. "GATOR!

Here, day was not the decorous successor to night known to us at home, lazily resuming sway over a drowsy world when the darkness thins and dies, bequeathing its lost kingdom to the unwilling light. This struggling, sun-born life in forest, swamp and teeming air was too urgent and too ephemeral to wait for the going of night before resuming its unchanging day-labor of growth, fruition and exhaustion once more. Day extended its reign into the darkness, stealing precious time from the night, and when the sky paled perceptibly at last the feeling of full day was already abroad on this impatient earth.

If you come across a blue, glowing rabbit running in forested areas, shoot it with an arrow, and it will leave rupees everywhere. If you want even more rupees, quietly sneak up on it and hit it repeatedly with a weapon. It will give you more rupees than shooting it with an arrow. Breath of the Wild Tip 34 You can use Cryonis to cross large bodies of water and deadly swamps without exhausting your staminal. However, use caution when it is raining. The blocks will be extra slippery and may cause you to fall off.

AH, THE FOREST MOON OF ENDOR! At last! Think what it’s been like for our heroes…. That endless desert on Tatooine, then the stinking lair of Jabba. For Luke there was a brief visit to a swamp: all mud and muck, no sunlight. And the rest of the time has been spent on various rebel spaceships, and let’s face it, the rebels can barely keep those things flying. There is no time or money to spend on interior decorating. And that Imperial shuttle may look nice from the outside, but inside it has been trashed by the countless sweaty stormtroopers it has hauled around. It reeks of stale sweat and every surface is covered in TK numbers1 scratched by bored troopers. So think how wonderful it is for our heroes to tumble out of that junker and breathe in the air of Endor’s moon, air purified by a hundred billion trees. It’s hard for residents of developed worlds to wrap their heads around a planet covered in trees.

this birthing celebration. No longer would elven society hide itself away from the kingdom folk. They would embrace each other and celebrate life. After all, Tamaerra was as much human as she was elf. Dieter Willowbrow became known throughout the Forest of Evermore as the elf who saved their whole race from annihilation. The Queen Mother offered Dieter the position of Master of Defense, but after fighting a war and reading the stories that Vaegon had written in his journal, Dieter found that the forest couldn’t contain his curiosity anymore. He declined in order to join the great wizard Hyden Hawk and his band of demon hunters. Bzorch, the mighty Lord of Locar, fought snappers, dactyls, and packs of zard for months while struggling to get out of the marshes. The fall he took hadn’t killed him. He found a rise on which to rest while he healed. He lived off of snappers and small geka until he was ready. Then he covered himself with the moss that hung from the swamp trees so he looked like one of the trolls that the typical marsh denizens seemed to avoid. He spent three long months fighting his way through the

Where should we go first, my friend?” The baldy asked. “The Forest or the Swamps?” “I don’t know,” the other shrugged. “But I think we’ll find someone willing to part with their lives and their tokens in both places.” “I don’t doubt it, my barbarian friend, I don’t doubt it.” They both laughed in a horrid, demonic manner.

Unlike forest or seashore, mountain or city, plain or swamp, the desert, any desert, suggests always the promise of something unforeseeable, unknown but desirable, waiting around the next turn in the canyon wall, over the next ridge or mesa, somewhere within the wrinkled hills.

Bacteria simply divide themselves in two when the time seems right, as can many single-celled eukaryotes. Many plants and animals have the ability to reproduce themselves on their own quite comfortably. Even among the species that do reproduce sexually, many can switch over to cloning. If you walk through a stand of hundreds of quaking aspen trees on a Colorado mountainside, you may be walking through a forest of clones, produced not by seeds but by the roots of a single tree that come back up out of the ground to form new saplings. Hermaphrodites, such as sea slugs and earthworms, are equipped with male and female sex organs and can fertilize themselves or mate with another. Some species of lizards are all mothers: in a process called parthenogenesis, they somehow trigger their unfertilized eggs to start developing. Compared with these other ways to reproduce, sex is slow and costly. A hundred parthenogenetic female lizards can produce far more offspring than fifty males and fifty females. In only fifty generations, a single cloning lizard could swamp the descendants of a million sexual ones.

And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media--it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benneton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity--our most necessary resource?

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow,” Gran says. I eye our property through the kitchen window. I happen to like the shadows, the seclusion of the trees, the whispers of the forest. Especially at night, when everything takes a less defined form, when the swamp comes to life. “I’m telling you, this world would be better off if they remembered that. ’Specially that neighbor of mine, never mindin’ his own business. Telling me I need to stop feeding the gators. I can feed the gators any damn time I want. It’s my land. I wish he’d just move on already, bless his heart.

We reject capitalism because it is abusive. Because it’s a system that argues: as long as the oligarchy is profiting, no atrocity is too grave, no violation too gross. Slavery, genocide, atomic war, swamps drained, forests burned, animals brought to extinction. Nothing is out of bounds and there are always plenty of reasons why it has to be this way…free market, forked tongue.

There is a madness about wilderness. The "savage and dreary" wilderness... Are we more enlightened in proclaiming that such places no longer disturb us, or have we lost touch with some fundamental paradox? Wilderness activists frequently insist that their aim is to reeducate the West into an unequivocal appreciation of the beauty of "natural" wilderness. Such a goal is puzzling, for it is unlikely that any human culture has unparadoxically embraced all its known regions of landscape. There is a concerted effort to clean up the imagination of wilderness and to remove any gloom associated with it. In the past this was achieved by literally clearing away the forests, swamps and jungles or by cultivating the deserts. Now it is being fantasized away by insisting that the oppressiveness and fear traditionally inspired by wilderness were biased and wrong.

Istare down at Hunter’s big hand swamping my smaller one as we walk towards the meadow instead of the forest. He didn’t make me put any shoes on when we passed them by at the back door. He glanced down at my bare toes, and I swear I saw him smile as he pulled me out the door. I like feeling the dirt beneath my feet.

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people — the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of trouble. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easy manipulated and dominated that scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test for loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots.

The Germans found out where the camp of our partisan unit was. They cordoned off the forest and the approaches to it on all sides. We hid in the wild thickets, we were saved by the swamps where the punitive forces didn’t go. A quagmire. It sucked in equipment and people for good. For days, for weeks, we stood up to our necks in water. Our radio operator was a woman who had recently given birth. The baby was hungry…It had to be nursed…But the mother herself was hungry and had no milk. The baby cried. The punitive forces were close…With dogs…If the dogs heard it, we’d all be killed. The whole group—thirty of us…You understand? The commander makes a decision… Nobody can bring himself to give the mother his order, but she figures it out herself. She lowers the swaddled baby into the water and holds it there for a long time…The baby doesn’t cry anymore…Not a sound…And we can’t raise our eyes. Neither to the mother nor to each other…

And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But

Years passed—or was it just a moment? Hard to say. Phyllis’s cognitive mind slipped farther and farther away and a different kind of awareness bloomed. The swamp breathed and she breathed with it. She saw everything: the creatures, the flowers, the tender shoots of green and the towering trees, the depths of the water. All that was dead and dying. All that was bursting with life. Her notebooks, tucked away in their plastic container, were gradually forgotten. The urge to record, to quantify, left her. Instead, she returned to the inclination that had guided her through all the years when her mind was sharp. The root of her curiosity: a simple and enduring desire to notice. There were moments during this last stretch when she occupied herself so completely that she forgot there had been any other time than now, any other way to exist but this. And there were also moments when she fought against the ebbing of logic and analysis, feeling adrift and upset, as if something precious had been taken from her that she would never have again. All of this was true. All of it was right. Memories of childhood dusted her skin like pollen. All it took was a brisk gust of wind to send it all scattering. She remembered learning—the crispness of a washed blackboard, a good mark on her paper, the perfect loneliness of a library; she remembered men she’d known and she remembered intimacy; she remembered her parents, having them and losing them; she remembered her sister, pretty and harsh and unwilling to imagine the future Phyllis had foreseen; she remembered teaching—the way her hands shook at the start of every term, her students and their litany of excuses; she remembered her research—working in the field, working at her desk, the minutiae of life glimpsed through a microscope; she remembered every forest she’d ever walked through; she remembered every city she’d ever visited; she remembered preparing, preparing, preparing. And then all of this was gone. Piece by piece, Phyllis said goodbye to each part of her life that had come before. She held on to Wanda the longest. As long as she could. She replayed every moment they had spent together. She repeated Wanda’s name to herself when Wanda left her alone in the tree house, reciting it like a chant, a prayer, so that when she came home, it would already be on her tongue. This didn’t always work. Sometimes Phyllis arrived in a moment she hadn’t been aware of—like time travel, hopping from one place to another with smooth, easy leaps. It was only when she saw the exhaustion on Wanda’s face that she realized she had missed something in between. “I’m sorry,” Phyllis said. “I think I…was somewhere else.” “That’s all right.” “What are we doing?” “We’re weaving nets. Do you want to help?” “Yes. Yes, please.” They sat

The forest was dense, and filled with all manner of vines and rank undergrowth; the road was a vague opening, where obstructing trees had been felled, the stumps and rotten trunks remaining. Across actual quags a track of logs and saplings had been laid, but long ago, now rotten and in broken patches. As far as the eye could reach, muddy water, sent back by a south wind from the gulf, extended over the vast flat before us, to a depth of from two to six feet, as per immediate personal measurement. We spurred in. One foot: Two feet, with hard bottom: Belly-deep, hard bottom: Shoulder-deep, soft bottom: Shoulder-deep, with a sucking mire: The same, with a network of roots, in which a part of the legs are entangled, while the rest are plunging. The same, with a middle ground of loose poles; a rotten log, on which we rise dripping, to slip forward next moment, head under, haunches in air. It is evident we have reached one of the spots it would have been better to avoid.

They sent Black boys out in front, facing continuous enemy shelling and strafing to build the bridges, clear the swamps, fell the forests, build the roads, and the vital airfields,” Burley reminded readers, “and then when the regular combat troops moved in, these Black boys dropped their picks and shovels, picked up guns and proved their worth in actual combat. And they died bravely

In the late summer of 2010, I visit Nowak at his home in Falls Church, Virginia. He is soft-spoken, slightly built, and a little stooped with age. Nowak has a cerebral demeanor, and in a Louisiana accent that softens his r’s, he might tell you he was born in the “fawties.” We sit in his living room, which is decorated with tiny statues of forest animals. Every few minutes, he darts down the hall to his desk - above which hangs a famous photo of a black-phase red wolf from the Tensas River - to retrieve books, graphs, and papers for reference. More than a decade after his retirement, Nowak remains engrossed by discussions of red wolf origins. Deep in conversation about carnassial teeth, he dives to grab his wife’s shitzsu, Tommy, to show me what they look like, then he thinks better of it. (Tommy had eyed him warily.) He hands me a copy of his most recent publication, a 2002 paper from Southeastern Naturalist. “When I wrote this, I threw everything I had at the red wolf problem,” he says. “This was my best shot.” He thumps an extra copy onto the coffee table between us. After a very long pause, he gazes at it and adds: “I’m not sure I have anything left to offer.” This is hard to accept, considering everything he has invested in learning about the red wolf: few people have devoted more time to understanding red wolves than the man sitting across the coffee table from me, absentmindedly stroking his wife’s dog. Nowak grew up in New Orleans, and as an undergraduate at Tulane University in 1962, he became interested in endangered birds. While reading a book on the last ivory-billed woodpeckers in the swamps along the Tensas River, his eyes widened when he found references to wolves. “Wolves in Louisiana! My goodness, I thought wolves lived up on the tundra, in the north woods, going around chasing moose and people,” Nowak recalls. “I did not know a thing about them. But when I learned there were wolves in my home state, it got me excited.

The next morning, Carley was nervous about both wolves encountering people. He made the decision to recapture them and place them back in their pens. The men shot cracker shells at Margie, hoping to push her back across the marsh to Bulls Island, but she hunkered down in the woods under deep leafy cover. The team set traps, hoping to catch her quickly, but their activity pushed her closer to U.S. Highway 17, which she crossed and moved to the northwest. It appeared she was on a beeline for the Francis Marion National Forest. On December 22, Carley decided to shoot her with a tranquilizer dart. If that didn’t work out, he’d just plain shoot her the next day. Luckily, a gunner in a Bell JetRanger helicopter lodged a dart in Margie’s back end by 1:00 P.M., saving Carley from having to make a fatal decision. By 3:00 P.M., she was back in her pen on Bulls Island, groggy but alive. The incident marked the first time in the lower forty-eight states that a live wolf was shot with a tranquilizer dart from a helicopter. (It worked so well that Carley began renting helicopters to flush and dart wild canids in the inaccessible marshes and swamps that neither horses nor boats could help his team penetrate in Louisiana and Texas.) The next afternoon, they caught Buddy, too. He had returned to Bulls Island, likely in search of Margie. With both wolves safely in their pen, Carley quipped to his team that the wolves were in better shape than their keepers. He and Dorsett were flat tuckered out. Though everyone laughed at his joke, Carley felt they all looked at him askance. They knew he had been prepared to shoot Margie. “Although it was ‘we’ who decided the statements [to shoot escaped wolves] should be made and adhered to,” Carley wrote in a field report on the incident, “in looking around after the recapture of the wolves, I had the distinct uncomfortable feeling of abandonment, and that ‘we’ had suddenly narrowed to ‘I.

Red wolves, like all wolves, develop and defend a home range, which is also known as a territory. You might think of a territory as a private hunting ground with specific boundaries. A territory might be patrolled by a single adult red wolf, but more often it is defended by a mated pair. The pair will attack, and even kill, other red wolves and coyotes that they find in their home range. They mark their boundaries with scent posts, which are basically spots where they squirt a little urine onto a tree or other object at sniffing height or on the ground; they also use scent from their anal glands or excrement placed where it will be noticed. A red wolf pack is usually a breeding male and female and often includes yearling wolves born the season before. But breeding pairs and pack territories are temporal. Pairs sometimes split up and bond with new mates. Territorial boundaries are fought over and redefined. The dynamics are ever changing. On average, today’s red wolf territories range in size from about thirty-seven to sixty-eight square miles. The amount of prey present in a given area, and the type of habitat within it, contribute to territory size - as do the energy requirements of the wolf maintaining it - so these numbers vary greatly. The East’s ecologically productive forests and swamps may be one reason why red wolves have smaller territories than gray wolves. Red wolves’ comparatively smaller stature, which equates to lower energy requirements, is another reason.

Were there land-hogs trying to corral grazing empires in PoweII’s time, and not above barefaced trespass on the public domain? They are still there, only now they are trying to bite out of national parks and national forests chunks of grazing land, oil land, timberland, that they covet. The conservation forces swamped such a foray in 1947;15 they will have others to fight, and they may never be able to restore the full effectiveness of the Grazing Service which Senator McCarran — a Senator Stewart come again, and from the same state — all but ruined by the profoundly Stewart-ian tactics of investigating and then cutting the budget.16

To expand their territory, they had never shied away from sacrificing lesser life in the past. Forests had been cleared, swamps drained, dams built. There had been countless examples of people destroying habitats and driving species to extinction for their own benefit. If they could do this on their own planet, why should some unknown world in the void of space be treated differently?

To expand their territory, they had never shied away from sacrificing lesser life in the past. Forests had been cleared, swamps drained, dams built. There had been countless examples of people destroying habitats and driving species to extinction for their own benefit. If they could do this on their own planet, why should some unknown world in the void of space be treated differently?

I’m talking about all the order in the natural world,” Malcolm said. “And how perhaps it can emerge fast, through crystallization. Because complex animals can evolve their behavior rapidly. Changes can occur very quickly. Human beings are transforming the planet, and nobody knows whether it’s a dangerous development or not. So these behavioral processes can happen faster than we usually think evolution occurs. In ten thousand years human beings have gone from hunting to farming to cities to cyberspace. Behavior is screaming forward, and it might be nonadaptive. Nobody knows. Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species.” “Yes? Why is that?” “Because it means the end of innovation,” Malcolm said. “This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they’ll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That’s the effect of mass media—it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there’s a McDonald’s on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there’s less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That’s disappearing faster than trees. But we haven’t figured that out, so now we’re planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it’ll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. Oh, that hurts. Are you done?

It’s been a harder book to write for personal reasons too. What gets me most are not the scary scientific studies about melting glaciers, the ones I used to avoid. It’s the books I read to my two-year-old. Looking For a Moose is one of his favorites. It’s about a bunch of kids that really, really, really want to see a moose. They search high and low—through a forest, a swamp, in brambly bushes and up a mountain, for “a long legged, bulgy nosed, branchy antlered moose.” The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page. In the end, the animals all come out of hiding and the ecstatic kids proclaim: “We’ve never ever seen so many moose!

[God's] words do not rain down like rocks on those he speaks to; they mount up with wings or leap through brambles or swim blackly in ponds. They sleep hainging from trees, stomachs full of hunted insects, or grow tall and imperious and leafy in the forest. Many, if not most, of his words hope never to be heard—rooting blindly throught their dirt-homes or proliferating on the tops of mountains, they are dismayed when they are discovered, and rush away. His words are not repetitive: the only thing his words have in common with each other is that they are strange and they are themselves—they move on their own, through gutters and caves and swamps and the sky, and some of his words, when they get tired of hearing his name over and over, and wish to hear him speak, escape out the back door, like ferrets, like me.

But Papa Bear couldn’t have been more wrong. The Thanksgiving Legend was coming on strong. Not more than ten or twelve miles away, at that very moment of that very day, in a dark, murky forest, the ground was shaking. From crane fly to croc, swamp creatures were quaking. Something was coming. The creatures were frantic. Something enormous. Something gigantic. It was Bigpaw, of course. He was bigger by far than Paul Bunyan’s horse, with shoulders like boulders, ditto his knees, with paws big as dumpsters and arms thick as trees. Out of the forest he came and he went, each footfall leaving a monster-sized dent. But Papa just scoffed and puffed out his chest. “Just forget about monsters and all of the rest. Because, my dears, I beg to suggest, when it comes to holidays, your Papa knows best.

The place of every creature from the forests and swamps that becomes extinct is occupied by something else, some new mutation, adapted to the artificial environment created by people.

My mind is like an Asian map; many places are covered with forests, deserts, swamps; in other words, it is filled with question marks.

I’m never having sex again. I’m canceling my bikini-wax appointments. Just gonna let the forest reclaim the land, succumb to my inner swamp witch.