Pari hienoa lainausta kirjailija ja luonnontieteilijä Henry Bestonin (1888-1968) kirjasta The Outermost House:
"Touch the
earth, love the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her
seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places. For the gifts of life
are the earth’s and they are given to all, and they are the songs of
birds at daybreak, Orion and the Bear, and the dawn seen over the ocean
from the beach."
"When
the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the
human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were a
kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of
the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity."
Ja se, josta pidän eniten:
"We
need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of
animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated
artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of
his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image
in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their
tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we
err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a
world older and more complete than ours they move finished and
complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never
attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren,
they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves
in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and
travail of the earth."
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