Bernd Heinrich Quotes

• “Movement is the essence of life.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “The very idea of "managing" a forest in the first place is oxymoronic, because a forest is an ecosystem that is by definition self-managing.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “There is nothing quite so gentle, deep, and irrational as running--and nothing quite so savage, so wild.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “Spraying to kill trees and and raspberry bushes after a clear-cut merely looks unaesthetic for a short time, but tree plantations are deliberate ecodeath. Yet, tree planting is often pictorially advertised on television and in national magazines by focusing on cupped caring hands around a seedling. But forests do not need this godlike interference... Planting tree plantations is permanent deforestation... The extensive planting of just one exotic species removes thousands of native species.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “Edward Abbey said you must "brew your own beer; kick in you Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it." I already had a good start. As a teenager in rural Maine, after we came to America, I had learned hunting, fishing, and trapping in the wilderness. My Maine mentors had long ago taught me to make home brew. I owned a rifle, and I'd already built a log cabin. The rest should be easy. I thought I'd give it a shot.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “Barry L. Jacobs and colleagues from the neuroscience program at Princeton University showed that when mice ran every day on an exercise wheel, they developed more brain cells and they learned faster than sedentary controls. I believe in mice.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “Planting nuts requires a vision for a future that goes beyond one’s mortal reach. If we envision ourselves as participants in the same grand, complex web of interactions as the forest, then planting acorns is like planting part of ourselves. The morality that comes from such a vision of ecosystem-as-life is a common thread that, if taught and encouraged, could unite all of mankind.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “We are social animals. We like to feel a part of something of beauty and power that transcends our insignificance. It can be a religion, a political party, a ball club. Why not also Nature? I feel a strong identity with the world of living things. I was born into it; we all were. But we may not feel the ties unless we gain intimacy by seeing, feeling, smelling, touching and studying the natural world. Trying to live in harmony with the dictates of nature is probably as inspirational as living in harmony with the Koran or the Bible. Perhaps it is also a timely undertaking.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “Running is perhaps the most fundamental of all sports, and it is economically the least costly to perform. As a consequence, it is the most democratic and most competitive of all sports because individual merit can prevail despite economic equality. It is a sport for everyone, the whole world over.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “We deny that we are part of the feast and seek to remove ourselves from it, even though we kill and consume animals by the billions and permanently remove the life resources for many more. But not one animal is allowed to consume us, even after we are dead. Not even the worms. We need a new creation story that connects us to nature and to others, one that can give us strength-- that can make us real rather than rich. Nature, religions, and science coincide on the real: kinship with each other and with the mountains and prairies, oceans and forests.”

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• “In order to forge alliances, we first need worthy adversaries. Without adversaries, no alliances are necessary.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “We gauge what we think is possible by what we know from experience, and our acceptance of scientific insights, in particular, is incremental, gained one experience at a time.”

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• “To walk in the woods and not recognize the songs [of the birds] is to not hear them. To not think of the birds' uniquely beautiful and artfully concealed nests is to have the woods seem empty. Most of us are like sleepwalkers here, because we notice so little.”

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• “There is beauty not only in that things work, but how they work.”

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• “Every morning in Africa, an antelope wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest antelope, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or an antelope—when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “Edward Abbey said you must "brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”

  Bernd Heinrich

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• “We need to take exercise, and vitamins, when our normal life styles, and diet, are at odds with the ancestral conditions that shaped us.”

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• “Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of less worth?”

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• “As John Fowles points out in The Tree (1979), nature is, unlike art, created as “an external object with a history…but also creating in the present, as we experience it. As we watch, it is so to speak rewriting, reformulating, repainting, rephotographing itself.”

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• “The ravens play individually, in pairs, or in samll groups; they circle high, dive, fold their wings, and shoot up or down with one or several of their fellows. They chase and frolic, tarry, turn loops; they make croaks, high cries, and rattling sounds. They do anything but fly in formation. They remind you of a bunch of schoolboys wandering down a lonely road, kicking a ball along. The geese fly mechanically, calling unvaryingly and beating their wings at a steady disciplined rhythm like soldiers marching off.”

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• “Around a bend, a pair of wood ducks makes squeaking calls and rises with splashing and then whistling wings. You do not see the male's brilliant garb of red, purple, green, and blue. But you know you are hearing the jewels of the marsh.”

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• “Consciousness is not a thing. It is a continuum without boundaries. We can most readily see its presence or absence in the extremes. In mussels, and in men. Is one of those extremes for birds found in ravens? Is it of sufficient magnitude for us to detect with our feeble detectors, our minds?”

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• “Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of resurrection. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, German philosopher”

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• “The newspaper, delivered daily to my mailbox, is a convenience I need to help start my fire in the morning. Not wanting to waste anything, I sometimes even read it.”

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• “There is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dreams, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place by E. B. White”

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