bell hooks quote

“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”

― bell hooks

the world

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

― E.B. White

Ancient quote

“These individuals have riches just as we say that we ‘have a fever,’ when really the fever has us.” — Seneca

Trees quote

 “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

― William Blake

Trees quote

 “Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”

― Hermann Hesse, Wandering

Bug quote

Quote of the month: 

“As an entomologist, I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects,”

said Sven Spichiger, the pest program manager at the Washington State Department of Agriculture.

Knowledge

 

Knowing is not enough, we must apply. 

Willing is not enough we must do.

- Goethe

 

Wendell Berry

“If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going.”

 ― Wendell Berry

Context quote

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird . . . So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts.

- Richard Feynman

Soils Quote of the Day

“A cloak of loose, soft material, held to the Earth’s hard surface by gravity, is all that lies between life and lifelessness.”
- Wallace H. Fuller, in Soils of the Desert Southwest, 1975.

Classic research approach

"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with the problems longer." --Albert Einstein

Quote

We are the bullies of the earth: strong, foul, coarse, greedy, careless, indifferent to others, laying waste as we proceed, leaving wounds, welts, lesions, suppurations on the earth body, increasingly engulfed by our own ordure and, finally, abysmally ignorant of the way the world works, crowing our superiority over all life.

- Ian McHarg

Celebrity endorsement

If you are not already following @geoawesomeness this image should convince you to.

Olmsted's plea for scientific agriculture

Watching science improve farming in other places, particularly England, Frederick Law Olmsted wanted his fellow farmers to see these same improvements. He plead for a better exchange of information that would help them all improve their yields and keep up with these standard bearers. Having detailed the great outcomes that were being elsewhere ("the average crop of all England has increased eight bushels per acre") he made this plea:

Farmers of Staten Island! it is the application of Science, of THOUGHT TO AGRICULTURE, that does this! What results might we anticipate if the Thought, the Skill, the Enterprise, the Energy, should be brought to bear upon our noble employment, which have given to the world the Steam Engine, the Cotton Gin, the Steamboat, the Railroad, the Electric Telegraph! And why shall we not ask it? No man expects the Merchant, the Mechanic, the Manufacturer of the present day to succeed in his calling while stupidly shutting his eyes to the light of Science, or scornfully pushing aside the proffered aid of the student. They readily avail themselves of aid from all sources. It is time the Farmer did so too. They have no patent right to improvement. Progress is no half-hardy plant that must be trained to the walls of cities. Why is it, then, that in all the pursuits of Human Industry we see such rapid achievement, while in our Art, the art on which all other arts depend, the wheels of progress move so strangely slow?

From the Appeal to the citizens of Staten Island by the Board of Managers of the Richmond County Agricultural Society, by Frederick Law Olmsted as corresponding secretary of the newly formed Richmond County Agricultural Society - December 1849.

The future is now

"We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes."

 

– Bill Joy, Cofounder and Chief Scientist, Sun Microsystems

Context quote

"Always design a thing by considering it in its next context-a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment in a city plan."

- Eliel Saarinen.

A critical fork in the road

"The profession of landscape architecture and the schools perpetuating it stand at a critical fork in the road.  One fork leads to a significant field of endeavor contributing to the betterment of human environment, while the other points to a subordinate field of superficial embellishment.  The question the profession and the schools must answer i s which road shall be followed and what adjustments may be made adequately to prepare landscape architects to solve the rising problems.  The need for comprehensive landscape architectural planning is not diminishing; on the contrary it is increasing.  The expansion of population and increase in complexity of environmental organization make the need greater today than ever before in history."

Hideo Sasaki, 1950

"Thoughts on education in landscape architecture"

in Landscape Architecture Magazine

Grand Canyon quote #2

"Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges, where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles; and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction, and beyond them mountains blending with the clouds."

- John Wesley Powell

Grand Canyon quote

"We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above; the waves are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands or lost among the boulders."

"We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly."

 - John Wesley Powell

Leopold quote

Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong.  Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.

— Aldo Leopold