Michael Pollan Quotes

I have been naturally inclined towards mountains, trees, flowers, and rivers.

The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.

Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind.

I love nature.

I'm interested in raw land and trees and fresh air and rivers and lots of animals around them.

Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

As a young boy, I was obsessed with endangered species and the extinct species that men killed off. Biology was the subject in school that I was incredibly passionate about.

To be in the woods is a special thing. And also just the concept of wilderness as a necessary opposite in a kind of global dialectic. I want there to be wilderness where there are no humans in a world like this. So nature is super important.

Nature abhors a garden.

Today, we must realize that nature is revealed in the simplest meadow, wood lot, marsh, stream, or tidepool, as well as in the remote grandeur of our parks and wilderness areas.

If I were entering adulthood now instead of in the environment of fifty years ago, I would choose a career that kept me in touch with nature more than science. ... Too few natural areas remain; both by intent and by indifference we have insulated ourselves from the wilderness that produced us.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild, and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World

It is from the Himalayan forests and ecosystems that I learned most of what I know about ecology.

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

We are not talking about esthetics. We are talking about life: survival of Man. We must train young people to get another vision of Nature. We call it 'wilderness,' and we think it is progress to get further and further away from it. How crazy! Where would we have been if Nature had not built us up?

We can never have enough of Nature.

The mission of men there seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible.

We are all part of the ecosystem.

In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness.

We need some contact with the things we sprang from. We need nature at least as a part of the context of our lives. Without cities we cannot be civilized. Without nature, without wilderness even, we are compelled to renounce an important part of our heritage.

The rainforests hold answers to questions we have yet to ask.