J.B. MacKinnon Quotes

• “The crisis in the natural world is one of awareness as much as any other cause. As a global majority has moved into cities, a feedback loop is increasingly clear. In the city, we tend not to pay much attention to nature; for most of us, familiarity with corporate logos and celebrity news really is of more practical day-to-day use than a knowledge of local birds and edible wild plants.* With nature out of focus, it becomes easier to overlook its decline. Then, as the richness and abundance of other species fade from land and sea, nature as a whole becomes less interesting—making it even less likely we will pay attention to it.”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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• “The crisis in the natural world is one of awareness as much as any other cause. As a global majority has moved into cities, a feedback loop is increasingly clear. In the city, we tend not to pay much attention to nature; for most of us, familiarity with corporate logos and celebrity news really is of more practical day-to-day use than a knowledge of local birds and edible wild plants.* With nature out of focus, it becomes easier to overlook its decline. Then, as the richness and abundance of other species fade from land and sea, nature as a whole becomes less interesting—making it even less likely we will pay attention to”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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• “Extinction wipes out, point by point, the clues to the code of existence; extirpation is the great, sucking retreat of the tide of life.”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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• “Not surprisingly, skilled Muscogee hunters quickly became the supply side of the deerskin trade. On the demand side was all of Europe, where deer had already been so badly overhunted that gloves in Paris were reportedly being made with rat skins. Before the era of denim, there were deer-leather breeches, and just as with blue jeans, these buckskins were worn first by laborers and then came into fashion among the aristocracy.”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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• “In the year 1377, a poet in what is now Germany speaks of entering the Great Wilderness, an unbroken forest that took three days to cross and was home to bison, wild boar, wild horses, wolves, bears, lynxes, and wolverines: “Pleasantry and laughing had become hushed,” he writes.”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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• “What the bolson tortoise reminds us is that it is ultimately less important to choose a baseline than it is to choose a direction. The direction the tortoise points to is the opposite of apocalypse.”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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• “The English language once had a word for the characteristic impression that a plant or animal offers to the eye. We called it the “jizz,” and the adoption of that term as sexual slang is unfortunate, as it seems unlikely we’ll come up with a replacement. It is the jizz, for example, that allows a skilled birdwatcher to know a bird by its silhouette alone , or by some quality of movement or the way it holds its head. The strangely unsteady flight of the turkey vulture, the flat forehead of the Barrow’s goldeneye, the endless headlong running of sanderlings on a mudflat— each of these is the jizz. It is so pure an essence that, if captured in a few rough lines drawn with charcoal, it can express an animal more authentically than a portrait by a trained artist who has never carefully watched the creatures he paints. It’s the jizz that ancient art so often represents. While looking at Egyptian treasures in a museum, I felt a rush of nostalgia when an engraving of a scarab beetle reminded me that I used to see a related species, the tumblebug, or Canthon simplex, roll balls of dung across my home prairie. I had completely forgotten; it took a 3,500-year-old artifact from another continent to make me remember.”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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• “We remember England’s “terms of venery”— the jargon of hunting— for giving us specific words for groups of animals, such as a school of fish or a pride of lions , and also for such quaintly forgotten phrases as “a tiding of magpies” and “a kindle of cats.” Experts suggest that many of the terms that amuse us today—“ an unkindness of ravens,” “a shrewdness of apes,” “a disworship of Scots”— were fanciful even in their own time and never in common use. The true language of venery, however, did more than describe beasts by the bunch; it richly evoked their behavior. The lark’s habit of flying into the air to sing was known as “exalting.” The nocturnal song of nightingales was called “watching,” from the idea of keeping a watch through the darkness. Venery’s description of animal sounds was poetic, but also accurate: weasels really do “squeak,” mice really do “cheep.” Goldfinches chirm, boars girn, starlings murmur, geese creak. The seemingly slow, ambling walk of bears was referred to as “slothing.” Ordinary life in the past had an intimacy with other species that today we mainly associate with trained biologists and dedicated naturalists.”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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• “The older names of flowers involved a similar degree of awareness; we might guess at the qualities of plants called hound’s piss and goodnight-at-noon, but it took real intimacy to name a flower courtship-and-matrimony: its sweet scent fades after picking.”

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• “Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.”

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• “The lone person on a wild landscape is a baseline of human liberty, a condition in which we are restrained by only physical limits and the bounds of our own consciousness.”

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• “Among natural landscapes , however, we show the greatest preference for open spaces dotted with trees , with a little water nearby— picture the views from the high-rises that famously border Central Park in Manhattan; as the biologist E. O. Wilson puts it, “to see most clearly the manifestations of human instinct, it is useful to start with the rich.”

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• “Elephants are one of the few species in which the importance of aging is slowly being acknowledged. During a 1993 drought in Tanzania, the elephant clans led by the oldest females suffered far fewer deaths than those with younger matriarchs— the herds needed leaders old enough to remember the distant waterholes that their own elders had led them to during droughts in the past. To maintain a mental map of those lifesaving pools requires the continuous presence through the centuries not only of adult elephants, but elderly ones— severe drought strikes Tanzania only every five decades or so, and elephants’ maximum life span is about sixty-five years.”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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• “For at least five hundred years, the Hawaiians lived in total isolation . They had no trade with the outside world, no other place to turn for the necessities of life; any islander could, with a walk to the nearest hilltop, see the limits of Hawaii’s natural wealth. For all intents and purposes, they were living on a tiny, fragile planet surrounded by outer space.”

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• “It is this capacity that now matters most to our future as a species: the part of us that feels awe in the knowledge that a simple clam, Arctica islandica, can live for as long as four hundred years, that the gingko tree has remained essentially unchanged through million years of evolution, but also that some insects have adult lives so brief they are born without mouths to eat with.”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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• “As a boy, I sometimes sat down from my wandering only to wake up an hour later, surprised to find I had fallen asleep in a warm patch of grass. That wouldn’t happen in bear country. When I walk in a place like Yellowstone, it’s always with a slight but solemn recognition of the slender possibility that I will die, that some wild animal will kill me. My senses come alive: I taste the air, listen for sounds beneath the wind. Suddenly, nature is not the backdrop to life, it is life itself, and I am no longer myself, but myself in nature. I note and classify even small changes: a shrew darting across the path, an updraft twisting a fern frond, a hummingbird gathering spiderweb for its nest. Light and form take on greater clarity, and given enough time to sink into these sensations , visual tricks will arise that are somewhere between vigilance and hallucination, such as seeing clearly every trembling leaf on a tree while in the same moment watching a bumblebee pass by in slow motion. As my senses reach outward, I spread away from myself. The world expands. It’s the closest a person can feel, I think, to being a flock of birds. The naturalist John Livingston described this perspective as a participatory state of mind, and speculated that among wild animals it is the ordinary form of consciousness. It would seem to have to be.”

  J.B. MacKinnon

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