Nature works on a clock far older than ours. The systems we depend on were built across millions of years; the damage we do takes centuries to repair.
We are stories, contained within the limited space of our skull and the few years granted to us. Carlo Rovelli · The Order of Time
A tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it. Peter Wohlleben · The Hidden Life of Trees
We are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. Elizabeth Kolbert · The Sixth Extinction
Across cosmic, physical, and biological scales, the same observation keeps surfacing: nature's clock is older than ours. The damage we cause in minutes takes centuries to repair. The systems we depend on were built across millions of years.
Sagan's Pale Blue Dot opens with a photograph taken by Voyager 1 at the edge of the solar system — Earth as a single pixel four billion miles away. The passage that accompanies the photo is the most quoted line in popular astronomy: a meditation on the cosmic scale and the moral weight of seeing ourselves at it.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Carl Sagan · Pale Blue Dot
Carson's The Sea Around Us, published in 1951, was the first book to make oceanography readable to a non-specialist audience. Its premise: the sea is the oldest continuous living system on the planet, and humans are an extraordinarily recent presence in it.
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which all life originally arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. Rachel Carson · The Sea Around Us
Rovelli's The Order of Time dismantles the assumption that time flows uniformly forward. At quantum scale, time is granular; in general relativity, it bends; in thermodynamics, it has direction only because entropy increases. The eternal present is a fiction of human nervous systems built for survival, not cosmology.
Time is the form in which we beings whose brains are made up essentially of memory and foresight interact with our world. Carlo Rovelli · The Order of Time
Five mass extinctions over geological time. Forty thousand years to grow an ancient forest. Four billion years for life to reach this moment. Whatever we do at this scale is a single frame in a film we did not start and will not finish.
Trees, it seems, are social beings. Peter Wohlleben · The Hidden Life of Trees