Willa

“As we know more or less well how to deal with our individual mortality, so we will deal with the collapse of our civilization. It is not so different. And it’s certainly not the first time that this will have happened. The Maya and Cretans, among many others, already experienced this. We are born and die as the stars are born and die, both individually and collectively. This is our reality. Life is precious to us because it is ephemeral. And as Lucretius wrote: “our appetite for life is voracious, our thirst for life insatiable” (De rerum natura, bk. III, line 1084). But immersed in this nature that made us and that directs us, we are not homeless beings suspended between two worlds, parts of but only partly belonging to nature, with a longing for something else. No: we are home.”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

“This stabilizes water flow in streams which, in turn, prevents scouring and the destruction of aquatic communities of insects, crustaceans, and fish. Who needs healthy stream communities? Well, who needs plentiful, reliable, clean, fresh water? Everything and everybody! Streams with diverse communities of aquatic insects and crustaceans carry two to eight times less waterborne nitrogen than streams with no aquatic arthropods; they also contain higher levels of dissolved oxygen (Sweeney and Newbold 2014).”
― Douglas W. Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

“As water that is held on-site by leaf litter seeps through soil pores on its way to the water table, it is purified. Excessive nitrogen and phosphorus loads that come from lawn and farm fertilizers are filtered out of the water, as are heavy metals, pesticides, oil, and other pollutants.”
― Douglas W. Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

“When we spray a tree to kill caterpillars, we first kill all natural enemies of those caterpillars, which are more susceptible to our insecticides than the target caterpillars. Spraying rarely kills all the caterpillars, so the following year, there is an explosion of caterpillars because there are not enough predators and parasitoids around to keep their numbers down. So we spray again. The predators that eat caterpillars include local birds that were unable to raise young the previous year because we had killed the caterpillars they feed their young. Consequently, each year we spray, there are fewer birds around to control caterpillar populations, and so we spray again. Soon, we are locked into spraying toxins all over our properties every year because we have eliminated the natural controls that kept those caterpillars in check—all this to save trees that are well adapted to spring caterpillar flushes and, unless otherwise stressed, would not have been harmed by the caterpillars in the first place.”
― Douglas W. Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees