Redwoods Quotes - Page 2

Civil disobedience can help to focus attention on a particular injustice. It was used historically to highlight wrongs in society - turning ancient redwood forests into paper towels or preventing people from sitting down at lunch counters because of the color of their skin. On climate change, we have not seen strong leadership coming from Washington, DC.In particular the president has an enormous opportunity to follow up on his inaugural speech with a concerted course of action to aggressively take on a clean energy transition.

Michael Brune

Strong, Opportunity, Color

"Sierra Club Turns to Civil Disobedience to Stop Keystone Pipeline". Interview with Kate Sheppard, www.motherjones.com. January 25, 2013.

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I saw them; there is nothing beautiful about them, just that they are a little higher than the others. Referring to one of the oldest and loveliest groves of redwoods, showing insensitivity to their magnificence.

Ronald Reagan

Beautiful, Tree, Littles

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It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these western woods ... Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time-and long before that-God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools.

John Muir

Years, Long, Tree

John Muir, Terry Gifford (1996). “John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings”, p.373, The Mountaineers Books

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For millennia the two-million acre redwood ecosystem thrived and sheltered myriad species of life. In the last 150 years, 97 percent of the original redwood forests have been destroyed by timber corporations. ... Big business cut-and-run logging operations have instilled a false dichotomy: jobs versus the environment.

Julia Hill

Running, Jobs, Cutting

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Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

Linda Hogan

Ocean, Dark, Winter

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Amory Lovins says the primary design criteria he uses is the question How do we love all the children? Not just our children, not just the ones who look like us or who have resources, not just the human children but the young of birds and salmon and redwood trees. When we love all the children, when that love is truly sacred to us in the sense of being most important, then we have to take action in the world to enact that love. We are called to make the earth a place where all the children can thrive.

Starhawk

Children, Love Is, Design

Starhawk (2011). “The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess: 10th Anniversary Edition”, p.19, Harper Collins

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The vineyard country, russet, reddish, carmine-brown in this season.
A blue outline of hills above a fertile valley.
It's warm as long as the sun does not set, in the shade cold returns.
A strong sauna and then swimming in a pool surrounded by trees.
Dark redwoods, transparent pale-leved birches.
In their delicate network, a sliver of the moon.
I describe this for I have learned to doubt philosophy
And the visible world is all that remains.

Czeslaw Milosz

Country, Strong, Philosophy

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When a chainsaw rips into a 2,000 year old redwood tree, it's ripping into my guts. When a bulldozer plows through the Amazon rainforest, it's ripping through my side. And when a Japanese whaling ship fires an exploding harpoon into a great whale it's my heart that's being blown to smithereens.

David Foreman

Rip, Heart, Fire

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Parrots, tortoises and redwoods live a longer life than men do; Men a longer life than dogs do; Dogs a longer life than love does.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love, Funny, Dog

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1956). “Collected Poems”, HarperCollins Publishers

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What a dull universe it would be if everything in it conformed to our expectations, if it held nothing to surprise or baffle us or confound our common sense. A century ago no one foresaw the existence of black holes, an expanding universe, oceans on Jupiter's moons, or DNA. What could be more enriching than to know that we share a common origin with all living things, that we are kin to chimpanzees, redwoods and mollusks? And isn't it a source of wonder to realize that the iron in our blood and the calcium in our bones were created in the bellies of supernovas?

Steven Pinker

Ocean, Moon, Dna

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Official education was telling people almost nothing of the nature of all those things on the seashores, and in the redwood forests, in the deserts and in the plains.

Gregory Bateson

Sea, People, Desert

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This land is your land, this land is my land

Woody Guthrie

Land, Trespassing, Trekking

"This Land Is Your Land" (song) (1956)

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Nature is a tenacious recycler, every dung heap and fallen redwood tree a bustling community of saprophytes wresting life from the dead and discarded, as though intuitively aware that there is nothing new under the sun. Throughout the physical world, from the cosmic to the subatomic, the same refrain resounds. Conservation: it's not just a good idea, it's the law.

Natalie Angier

Nature, Law, Ideas

Natalie Angier (2008). “The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science”, p.113, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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All forests have their own personality. I don't just mean the obvious differences, like how an English woodland is different from a Central American rain forest, or comparing tracts of West Coast redwoods to the saguaro forests of the American Southwest... they each have their own gossip, their own sound, their own rustling whispers and smells. A voice speaks up when you enter their acres that can't be mistaken for one you'd hear anyplace else, a voice true to those particular tress, individual rather than of their species.

Charles de Lint

Rain, Mean, Voice

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Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss. If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss, you'll see toads, small insects, a whole host of life that prospers in that miniature environment. A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.

Sylvia Earle

Cities, Feet, Forests

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My father had been opposed to my flying from the first and had never flown himself. However, he had agreed to go up with me at the first opportunity, and one afternoon he climbed into the cockpit and we flew over the Redwood Falls together. From that day on I never heard a word against my flying and he never missed a chance to ride in the plane.

Charles Lindbergh

Father, Fall, Opportunity

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To be worth making at all a journey has to be made in the mind as much as in the world of objects and dimensions. What value can there be in seeing or experiencing anything for the first time unless it comes as a revelation? And for that to happen, some previously held thought or belief must be confounded, or enhanced, or even transcended. What difference can it make otherwise to see a redwood tree, a tiger, or a humming bird?

Ted Simon

Journey, Differences, Bird

Ted Simon (1984). “Riding Home”

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Let me put it this way. According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood.

Erma Bombeck

Feet, Way, Ninety

Erma Bombeck (2013). “The Erma Bombeck Collection: If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?, Motherhood, and The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank”, p.110, Open Road Media

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Tree It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books-- Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Jane Hirshfield

Book, House, Tree

Jane Hirshfield, “Tree”

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Going up north with the redwoods and driving along the coast, it's got everything, man. It's got the desert, the mountains, and the ocean. It's beautiful.

Chad Smith

Beautiful, Ocean, Men

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One day's exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books.

John Muir

Book, Adventure, One Day

John Muir, Linnie Marsh Wolfe (1979). “John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir”, p.95, Univ of Wisconsin Press

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Uncle Sam is not often called a fool in business matters, yet he has sold millions of acres of timber land at two dollars and a half an acre on which a single tree was worth more than a hundred dollars. But this priceless land has been patented, and nothing can be done now about the crazy bargain.... a bad, black business from beginning to end.

John Muir

Uncles, Crazy, Land

John Muir (2015). “JOHN MUIR Ultimate Collection: Travel Memoirs, Wilderness Essays, Environmental Studies & Letters (Illustrated): Picturesque California, The Treasures of the Yosemite, Our National Parks, Steep Trails, Travels in Alaska, A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf, Save the Redwoods, The Cruise of the Corwin and more”, p.607, e-artnow

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He is likely to remain the one historian of the Sierra; he imported into his view the imagination of the poet and the reverence of the worshipper.... William Kent, during Muir’s life, paid him a rare tribute in giving to the nation a park of redwoods with the understanding that it should be named Muir Woods. But the nation owes him more. His work was not sectional but for the whole people, for he was the real father of the forest reservations of America.

Robert Underwood Johnson

Father, Real, America

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To survive, our minds must taste redwood, and agate, octopi, bat, and in the bat's mouth, insect. It's hard to think like a planet, but we've got to try.

James Bertolino

Thinking, Mind, Trying

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That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

Malcolm Gladwell

Philosophy, Cities, Trying

"How David Beats Goliath" by Malcolm Gladwell, www.newyorker.com. May 11, 2009.

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