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| Milkweed seed pod, Blue Jay Farm, Missouri. October 2010. |
The real Wild Kingdom is as small and brown as a wren, as tedious as a squirrel turning back the scales of a pine cone to capture its seeds, as quiet as a milkweed seed on the wind - the long, slow stillness between takes. This, I think, is the message in the bottle from Thoreau, [in Faith in a Seed] the man who noticed a clump of seeds caught in the end of a cow's whisking tail ...
Source: Barbara Kingsolver, The Forest in the Seeds, from her 1995 book of essays, High Tide in Tucson.
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| Seed pod, Ha Ha Tonka State Park, Missouri. October 2010. |
... As a nation we will never defer to the endangered spotted owl .... until we are much more widely educated. But the things we will have to know - concepts of food chain, habitat, selection pressure and adaptation, and the ways all species depend on others - are complex ideas that just won't fit into a thirty-second spot. Evolution can't be explained in a sound bite.
Barbara Kingsolver
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| Curled seed pod, Alamogordo, New Mexico. July 2013. |
Even well-intentioned educational endeavors like carefully edited nature films, and the easy access to exotic animals offered by zoos, are tailored to our impatience. They lead us to expect nature will be all storm and no lull. It's a dangerous habit. Natural history writer Robert Michael Pyle asks: 'If we can watch rhinos mating in our living rooms, who's going to notice the wren in the back yard'?
Barbara Kingsolver
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| Magnolia fruit, Opelousas, Louisiana. October 2015. |
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