Gary Paul Nabhan > Quotes

“Solitude takes time, and caregivers to children have no time. Our children demand attention and need care. They ask questions and parents must answer. The number of decisions that go into a week of parenting astonishes me. Women have known for centuries what I have just discovered: going to work every day is far easier than staying home raising children...thoughtful parenting requires time to think, and parents of young children do not have time to think...One middle-aged female writing student spoke to me of feeling she lacked the freedom to "play hooky in nature"; it is an act of leisure men indulge in while women stay at home, keeping domestic life in order. Men often can justify poking around in the woods as a part of their profession, or as part of an acceptably manly activity like hunting or fishing. Women, for generations circumscribed by conventional values, must purposefully create opportunities for solitude, for exploration of nature or ideas, for writing.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places

“play has become too domesticated and regimented while playgrounds themselves have become more and more barren. May today are devoid of vegetation with which to form nests, shelters, wands, dolls, or other playthings...These concerns are best explored in a heterogeneous habitat, where several secret niches are harbored, the kinds that can no longer be found on prefabricated metal and plastic jungle gym.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places

“I heard a young city boy ask an elderly Papago woman if, lacking a harvesting pole, one could ever collect fruit off the tall cacti by throwing rocks at the tops to knock the fruit down.

'NO!' Marquita replied with a strain of horror in her voice. 'The saguaros- they are Indians too. You don't EVER throw ANYTHING at them. If you hit them on the head with rocks you could kill them. You don't ever stick anything sharp into their skin either, or they will just dry up and die. You don't do anything to hurt them. They are Indians.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country

“A Sonoran Desert village may receive five inches of rain one year and fifteen the next. A single storm may dump an inch and a half in the matter of an hour on one field and entirely skip another a few hours away. Dry spells lasting for months may be broken by a single torrential cloudburst, then resume again for several more months. Unseasonable storms, and droughts during the customary rainy seasons, are frequent enough to reduce patterns to chaos.

The Papago have become so finely tuned to this unpredictability that it shapes the way they speak of rain. It has also ingrained itself deeply in the structure of their language.

Linguist William Pilcher has observed that the Papago discuss events in terms of their probability of occurrence, avoiding any assumption that an event will happen for sure...

Since few Papago are willing to confirm that something will happen until it does, an element of surprise becomes part of almost everything. Nothing is ever really cut and dried. When rains do come, they're a gift, a windfall, a lucky break.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country

“We need to return to learning about the land by being on the land, or better, by being in the thick of it.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan

“We have reached the end of the road that is built on the set of traits held out for male identity--advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary.... we have arrived at a point from which we must seek a basis of faith in connection-- and not only faith but recognition that it is a requirement for the existence of human beings.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan Stephan Trimble, The Geography of Childhood: Why Children Need Wild Places

“Eating chestnuts is a sign of poverty. Because wheat bread is eaten in the city, chestnut bread is associated with the poor country table.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves: An American Naturalist in Italy

“These later Nabataean innovations were clandestine water catchments linked through well-like shafts connected to a horizontal tunnel that tapped into groundwater and harvested rainwater and stored them both in underground cisterns. The scientist who discovered their efficacy and extent, Berel Aisenstein, referred to these ingenious Nabataean creations as “artificial springs.”19 These chains of wells were so effective in providing a steady flow of fresh drinking water that Nabataeans were able to survive in areas that received as little as a single inch of rainfall in a drought year!”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey

“The sentiment underlying this local possessiveness of distinctive crops, foods, and customs is known in Italy as campanilismo. It is somewhat negatively defined in dictionaries as 'an excessive attraction to one's own homeland or birthplace.' As it is derived from the word for bell, campana, a more literal definition might be 'belief or faith in what lies within earshot of the village bell.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves: An American Naturalist in Italy

“Around 1870, the archaeologist E. H. Palmer began to map the thousands of intentionally shaped mounds of cobbles where grapes once grew—the enigmatic tuleilat el-anab.17 They were moisture catchers, agrohydrological structures that were engineered to condense, capture, and deliver fog and dew to fuel the growth of the vines, wheat, and fruit trees.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey

“This provincialism certainly has its detractors, but it is not the same as myopia. At its core is a heartfelt appreciation for local resources and traditions. This appreciation has fostered the rich cultural, agricultural, and culinary heritage that has characterized much of rural Italy, as well as many other peasant cultures around the world.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves: An American Naturalist in Italy

“It is clear that from an early age Vavilov was thinking about plant pathology in an evolutionary, geographic context, rather than assuming that plant diseases randomly crop up in some sort of vacuum.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan