"When woods
and trees are
destroyed –
incidentally,
deliberately –
imagination
and memory
go with them.”
― The Old Ways
"... mountains,
like all
wildernesses,
challenge our
complacent
conviction –
so easy to
lapse into –
that the world
has been made
for humans
by humans.”
― Mountains of the Mind
"We all carry
trace fossils
within us –
the marks that
the dead and
the missed
leave behind.”
― Underland
"Woods have
been a place of
inbetweenness,
somewhere
one might slip
from one world
to another,
or one time
to a former.'”
"We are,
as a species,
finding it
increasingly
hard to imagine
that we are part
of something
which is larger
than our own
capacity.”
― The Wild Places
"Philip Larkin
famously proposed
that what will
survive of us
is love. Wrong.
What will survive
of us is plastic,
swine bones
and lead-207,
the stable isotope
at the end of
the uranium-235
decay chain.”
― Underland
"Books, like
landscapes,
leave their marks
in us.”
― Landmarks
"Paths are
the habits of
a landscape.
They are acts
of consensual
making. It's
hard to create
a footpath
on your own...”
― The Old Ways
"As we have
amplified our
ability to shape
the world, so we
become more
responsible for
the long
afterlives
of that shaping.
The Anthropocene
asks of us the
question memorably
posed by the
immunologist
Jonas Salk:
‘Are we being
good ancestors?.”
―Underland
― Robert MacFarlane, natural history writer, academic, poet, b. 1976