We are touring the Ozarks. Here is an abandoned field in which the ragweed is sparse and short. Does this tell us anything about why the mortgage was foreclosed? About how long ago? Would this field be a good place to look for quail? Does short ragweed have any connection with the human story behind yonder graveyard? If all the ragweed in this watershed were short, would that tell us anything about the future of floods in the steam? About the future prospects for bass or trout?
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"Natural History: The Forgotten Science", page 62Aldo Leopold
Steam is the friend of man. Steam engines are very human. Their very weaknesses are understandable. Steam engines do not flash back and blow your face in. They do not short-circuit and rive your heart with imponderable electric force. They have arms and legs and warm hearts and veins full of warm vapour. Give us steam every time. You know where you are with steam.
William McFee
"It was hard not to laugh. Determination like that in a ten-year-old is something to see. He was like a pit bull."
"If pit bulls wore glasses and were allergic to ragweed."Cassandra Clare
He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, which he said were like that tyrant's bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short.
Ben Jonson
With a long slow stride, limping a little from his blistered feet, Bud walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans glittered among grass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between ranks of billboards and Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned squatters’ shacks, past gulches heaped with wheelscarred rubbishpiles where dumpcarts were dumping ashes and clinkers, past knobs of gray outcrop where steamdrills continually tapped and nibbled, past excavations out of which wagons full of rock and clay toiled up plank roads to the street, until he was walking on new sidewalks along a row of yellow brick apartment houses, looking in the windows of grocery stores, Chinese laundries, lunchrooms, flower and vegetable shops, tailors’, delicatessens. (pp. 23-24)
John Dos Passos
"What is the present outlook in the field of energy generation? One word suffices - catastrophic! Through over-illumination and overheating of the media of earth, water and air in Nature's household, a short circuit - 'cold fire' - and the development of cancer has been triggered off. With nuclear fission a conflagration was kindled, whose ashes and slag residues alone will extinguish all life. Thus a reporter stated recently, "For the time being this radiating thing is there and with it the attendant worries as to how we can protect ourselves against these lethal ray, which penetrate even the thickest lead shields." The sheer lunacy of using nuclear power for peaceful purposes will be just as short-lived as the subsequent remorse will be long."
Viktor Schauberger
Leopold, Aldo
Leopold, John R.
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