Gearing Up

As I make the final edits to our FAll syllabus, I realized that some of the quotes I have embedded in it are worth sharing.

About the stewardship of the land:

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

- Wendell Berry

About learning from nature:

I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorally.

- E. B. White

And, as we struggle with absorbing information about places, Marc suggested this one:

Memory cannot retain everything; if it could, we would be overwhelmed with data. Memory is the result of a process of selection and of organizing what is selected so that it is within reach in expectable situations. There must also be some random accumulations to enable us to discover unexpected relationships. But serendipity is possible only when recollection is essentially a holding fast to what is meaningful and a release of what is not.

Kevin Lynch
What Time Is This Place?
MIT Press, 1972

Some good thoughts to start a new school year.