Extracts
On Climate
Selected from the Fall 2019 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.
To the extent that people separate themselves from nature, they spin out further and further from the center.
—Masanobu Fukuoka, 1975
Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?
—D. H. Lawrence, 1920
Conversations led me to make a preliminary estimate of the probable effect of a variation of the atmospheric carbonic acid on the temperature of the earth. As this estimation led to the belief that one might in this way probably find an explanation for temperature variations of 5 to 10 degrees Celsius, I worked out the calculation more in detail and lay it now before the public and the critics.
—Svante Arrhenius, 1895
During all that year its orb rose pale and without radiance, while the heat that came down from it was slight and ineffectual, so that the air in its circulation was dark and heavy owing to the feebleness of the warmth that penetrated it, and the fruits, imperfect and half-ripe, withered away and shriveled up on account of the coldness of the atmosphere.
—Plutarch, 44 BC
Conjecturing a Climate Of unsuspended Suns– Adds poignancy to Winter —Emily Dickinson, 1863
The iron in the fruit and vegetables we eat, which thence goes into our blood, may not very long ago have formed a part of the cosmic dust that drifted for untold ages along the highways of planets and suns.
—John Burroughs, 1908
Ah, what dreadful screams were heard in the dark air rent by the fury of the thunder and the lightning it flashed forth that darted through the clouds bearing ruin and striking down all that withstood its course! Ah, you might see many stopping their ears with their hands in order to shut out the tremendous sounds made in the darkened air by the fury of the winds mingling with the rain, the thunders of heaven, and the fury of the thunderbolts! Others, not content to shut their eyes, laid their hands over them, one above the other to cover them more securely in order not to see the pitiless slaughter of the human race by the wrath of God.
—Leonarda da Vinci, 1514
We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.
—Barbara Ward, 1972
Every barrel of oil represents both a swath of land and an epoch of life—the product of photosynthesis and the geological remains of once living organisms—concentrated to its potent essence.
—Astra Taylor, 2019
It is not that we have certain states imposed on us by the atmosphere; the fact that the atmosphere possesses a state of freshness is that we ourselves feel revived. We discover ourselves, that is, in the atmosphere.
—Watsuji Tetsuro, 1929
The destructive agency of man becomes more and more energetic and unsparing as he advances in civilization, until the impoverishment with which his exhaustion of the natural resources of the soil is threatening him…commences an almost indiscriminate warfare upon all the forms of animal and vegetable existence around him.
—George Perkins Marsh, 1864
You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.
—Horace, 20 BC
We are living in a golden age, the most gilded golden age of human history—not only of past history but of future history.
—Aldous Huxley, 1956
The oldest voice in the world is the wind.
—Donald Culross Peattie, 1950
Civilization inevitably runs to its end with a blindfold over its eyes.
—Eugène Huzar, 1855
Meanwhile and slowly, consulting sources scientific, philosophical, and poetic, I got to know myself as an organism, like every other organism in the cosmos, made from the wreckage of spent stars.
—Lewis H. Lapham, 2019
There is something from every living being in the atmosphere.
—Pablo Neruda, 1966
It is probably very seldom that water falls as rain within a thousand miles of the spot where it rose upward as vapor.
—William Stanley Jevons, 1859
Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artifact we create.
—W.G. Sebald, 1995
Sometime in the last twenty years, the best brains of the Occident discovered to their amazement that we live in an Environment. This discovery has been forced on us by the realization that we are approaching the limits of something.
—Gary Snyder, 1977
By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature.
—Karl Marx, 1867
The old idea of a static landscape, like a single musical chord sounded forever, must be abandoned, for such a landscape never existed except in our imagination.
—Daniel B. Botkin, 1990
Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
—Francis Bacon, 1625
If economic viability trumps human health in systems of governance, and if personal rights trump community obligations at almost every turn, what sort of future can we expect never to see?
—Barry Lopez, 2019
The generality of men are so accustomed to judge of things by their sense that, because the air is invisible, they ascribe but little to it and think it but one remove from nothing.
—Robert Boyle, 1673
The surface environment of Venus is a warning: something disastrous can happen to a planet rather like our own.
—Carl Sagan, 1980
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts as for that subtle something, that quality of the air, that emanation from the old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1876
Things are first known when lost.
—Timothy Morton, 2010
I have conceived the stupendous idea of reorganizing the climates of the earth according to the desire of the populations interested. That is to say, I will furnish climates to order, for cash or negotiable paper, taking the old climates in part payment, of course, at a fair discount, where they are in condition to be repaired at small cost and let out for hire to poor and remote communities not able to afford a good climate and not caring for an expensive one for mere display.
—Mark Twain, 1892
You do not have to travel to find the sea, for the traces of its ancient strands are everywhere about.
—Rachel Carson, 1951
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CLIMATE
Fall 2019