Human–nature relationship

“ Dear Associates, There hath been many Human Societies, that have perswaded themselves, That there are such Restoring Actions of Nature, which will restore, not only a Dead, but a Dispersed Society; by reason they have observed, That Vegetables seem to dye in one Season, and to revive in another: as also, that the Artificial Actions of Human Creatures, can produce several Artificial Effects, that resemble those we name Natural; which hath occasioned many Human Creatures to wast their Time and Estates, with Fire and Furnace, cruelly torturing the Productions of Nature, to make their Experiments. ”

“ We realize that despite our cunning and contrivance, our successes are, as it were, largely matters of grace; the changes we can make in Nature are as nothing to the slow, gradual processes by which Nature makes mountains into molehills, builds and destroys continents, develops man out of the lower animals, and, by varying climates and topographies, affects the destinies of nations. ”

“ These evidences are strengthened by observation of the natural economy of our time; for, whenever a tract of country once inhabited and cultivated by man, is abandoned by him and by domestic animals, and surrendered to the undisturbed influences of spontaneous nature, its soil sooner of later clothes itself with herbaceous and arborescent plants, and, at no long interval, with a dense forest growth. ”

“ No part of the world can be truly understood without a knowledge of its garment of vegetation, for this determines not only the nature of the animal inhabitants but also the occupations of the majority of human beings. ”

“ Thus all nature is linked together by invisible bonds, and every organic creature, however low, however feeble, however dependent, is necessary to the well-being of some other among the myriad forms of life with which the Creator has peopled the earth. ”

“ So our love is active, and it vehemently impels us to get to know her better and better, to get ourselves in ever closer touch with her, to discover the utmost fulness of her Beauty, and to communicate to others all that we have come to know and all the Beauty we have seen, so that others may share in our enjoyment and come to love Nature more even than we love her ourselves—love Nature in all her aspects, love physical Nature in the mountains, seas and deserts, the clouds, sunsets and stars, love plant Nature and animal Nature and human Nature ”

“ Man, the human animal, will live in the environment he has the intelligence to understand and to preserve.
“... All creatures are linked to each other ... in their dependence on limited environments that together form the whole of nature ...” (Page 3) . (White-capped noddy tern nesting colony, Engebi Island, Eniwetok Atoll, photographed in 1965.) ”

“ My eighth geological argument for the divine benevolence [Pg 213] is based upon the perfect adaptation of the natures of animals and plants to the varying condition of the globe through all the periods of its past history.
The very slight changes in climate, situation, and food, that will destroy most species of animals and plants, is hard to be realized by man, whose nature will sustain very great changes of this kind. So will most of the animals and plants that have been domesticated by man, and which accompany him into every soil and climate. ”

“ Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt. ”

“ One of the principal elements in human happiness is the realization of beauty in nature, whether it be in the exquisite form and color of the petal of a rose, the glowing green of the beetle's armor, the flight of the swallow, the moonlight serenade of the mocking bird, the iridescent green and bronze ocelli of the peacock's tail-coverts, the mountains veiled in opalescent mists, the abysmal blue of the ocean, the glory of red and gold in the sunset, or the shimmer of the myriad stars. ”

“ And some of the harmless animals would be permitted to live that the future population might know them. It was to be the fulfilment of a millennium-old dream—a warm, sunlight world, a kindly, young world where nature supplied the air, and the water, and the warmth in great abundance. ”

“ The light of the setting sun and its glowing reflection in the western ocean are not more identical than the natural law and the eternal law. Under Nature's guidance animals struggle for existence, nourish themselves, propagate their species, and in general strive to attain their highest material development. ”

“ It made him feel how insignificant is man in nature’s world. Man, the animal, as exhibited by the naked savages who inhabited this forest was Nature’s own child; assuredly this bird was not so decorated to please him! Man, the intellectual, civilized man, could feel a thrill of rapture over this creature of Nature’s, admire its intense golden-orange throat scales, its rich, velvety, purple-black plumage, its crown of vivid emerald and topaz colors, with the long wire-haired plumes springing back like a coronet from its head ”

“ Man has not only subverted the natural numerical relations of wild as well as domestic quadrupeds, fish, birds, reptile, insect, and common plants, and even of still humbler tribes of animal and vegetable life, but he has effected in the forms, habits, nutriment and products of the organisms which minister to his wants and his pleasures, changes which, more than any other manifestaion of human energy, resemble the exercise of a creative power. ”

“ How is the happy and innocent state of man consistent with the contemporaneous existence of carnivorous and predaceous animals, which, as both Scripture and geology state, were created in abundance in the sixth day? How, when confined to a limited region, could he increase and multiply and replenish the earth? These questions, which have caused no little perplexity, are easily solved when brought into the light of our modern knowledge of nature. ”

“ Beasts and fishes, birds and reptiles, weeds and flowers—which here are weeds, and there are flowers, according to local fancy—the dwarfed shrub of the Alpine steeps, and the monster palm of the tropical plains; the world is wide enough to contain them all, and man is wise enough to love them all, each in its sphere, and its degree. But what we do for Nature, we refuse to Humanity. ”

“ All naturalists have speculated upon the great plan of Nature; a grand array of organic essences, in which every species should be related in like ratio to its fellow species, by certain affinities, without gaps and without redundancies; the whole constituting a beautiful and perfect unity, a harmonious scheme, worthy of the infinite Mind that conceived it. Such a perfect plan has never been presented by any existing fauna or flora; nor is it made up by uniting the fossil faunas and floras to the recent ones ”

“ To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius. ”

“ But also the relation of man to external nature as the occupant of specific geographical areas, and subject to certain influences of climate, food, material appliances and conditions of life, involves conclusions of growing importance, in view of many novel questions to which the enlarged inquiry as to his true place in nature has given rise. ”

“ Just as the species of your planet have changed in succeeding ages from the uncouth creatures of the first geological periods to the appearance of man, and as even now the animal and vegetable population of the Earth is still composed of the most widely varying forms, from man to the coral, from bird to fish, from an elephant to a butterfly, so on an incomparably vaster scale the forces of Nature have given birth to an infinite diversity of beings and things throughout the innumerable worlds of heaven. ”

“ A similar process can be identified in our present relation to the physical environment. Many things mediate between us and the natural environment: our homes, clothes, the food processing industry. Even natural artifacts, such as gardens, lakes, or water channels, are a buffer against nature, an insertion between us and nature. Constituted in our language are experiences of survival and adaptation: the vocabulary of hunting, fishing, agriculture, animal husbandry, coping with changes in weather and climate, and coping with natural catastrophes such as floods and earthquakes. ”

“ That affection, in Nature, assured the species of continued life. It was a blind mechanism, designed by evolution to defy drought and disease and famine. Nature has implanted it very strongly in most animals, but rarely in plants. The female plants looked on him as a mate ”

“ They seek to ascertain the facts of the Creation, and the yet hidden causes which bind them together in relations of eternal harmony and peace. They seek in the atmosphere for signs to lead to the comprehension of the laws which regulate its movements; they study the vegetable growths of forest and field to learn how to increase the products of the soil; they inquire into the nature and habits and structure of the living inhabitants of the air, the earth, and the seas, to know the best and easiest modes of rendering them profitable to society ”

“ How recognize the effects produced by climate, food, &c.? How, again, distinguish these from those other effects which come from the intermixture of races, either when wild or in a state of domestication? All these causes, in the course of time, alter even the most constant forms, so that the imprint of Nature does not preserve its sharpness in races which man has dealt with largely. ”

“ Moreover, an additional fact of great interest here comes to fortify all our inferences—the organic remains of plants and animals which abound in the earth are not those of the tribes that now live, but of many wholly extinct, and often quite different, races—different in form and structure, and, consequently, in function and habits of life, though certainly belonging to a general system of nature founded on analogous principal conditions. ”

“ To understand rightly the daily accumulating stores of organic reliquiæ, requires more than a slight knowledge of existing nature,—more even than an acquaintance with animal and vegetable forms. The philosophy of their existence must be considered—the variations of their structure, with respiration in air or in water—life in fresh or salt water—in trees or on the ground—carnivorous or herbivorous food—their geographical distribution dependence—on climate and atmospheric conditions. ”

“ "It would seem almost as if Nature—Fate—had meant to give a new impulse to the race—to rouse human creatures to new moods, to thrust them into places where they see new things. Men and women are being dragged out of their self-absorbed corners and stirred up and shaken. ”

“ The earth was not, in its natural condition, completely adapted to the use of man, but only to the sustenance of wild animals and wild vegetation. These live, multiply their kind in just proportion, and attain their perfect measure of strength and beauty, without producing or requiring any important change in the natural arrangements of surface, or in each other's spontaneous tendencies, except such mutual repression of excessive increase as may prevent the extirpation of one species by the encroachments of another. ”

“ We shall tell of the changing climates of this spinning globe and the coming and going of great floras and faunas, mighty races of living things, until out of the vast, slow process our own kind emerged. And we shall tell the story of our race. How through hundreds of thousands of years it won power over nature, hunted and presently sowed and reaped. How it learnt the secrets of the metals, mastered the riddle of the seasons, and took to the seas. ”

“ Naturalists know well enough how indeterminate the harmonies between a fauna and its environment are. An animal may better his chances of existence in either of many ways,—growing aquatic, arboreal, or subterranean ”

“ The trees of the forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent.” All nature breathes love, which is expressed in self-abnegation, dying that other species may live. Prof. Darwin at a meeting of a Scientific Society in Dublin made this statement, “All vegetation sees, hears, breathes and feels.” ”

“ Whether explicitly stated or not, nature was seen as earthbound, the source of our existence, the provider. Cosmos, beyond our reach, should not be interfered with. The experience of extraterrestrial research expanded the notion of nature. In today's integrated world, resources and environmental concerns also contribute to the expanded notion of nature pertinent to our activity and life. Our worries about pollution of earth, oceans, and skies are not religious in nature. ”

“ Constant comradeship with Nature seems to beget placidity and quiet assurance. From using the great natural forces which bring to pass crops and the seasons, they seem to work in and through him also. ”

“ As scientists explore deeper and deeper into the intricacies of animal behavior and obtain more and more knowledge of the ecological relationships among animals and between animals and plants, it becomes increasingly clear that these relationships present a delicate balance or adjustment of nature. ”

“ The myriads of petrified Remains which are disclosed by the researches of Geology all tend to prove, that our Planet has been occupied in times preceding the Creation of the Human Race, by extinct species of Animals and Vegetables, made up, like living Organic Bodies, of “Clusters of Contrivances,” which demonstrate the exercise of stupendous Intelligence and Power. ”