The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've got the fish, you can forget the trap...Words exist because of meaning; once you've got the meaning you can forget the words— attributed to Lao Tse
Domes, Barchan, Barchanoid Ridge, Transverse Ridge, Linear or Longitudinal, Reversing, Star
Sheet, Streak, Shadow, Climbing (and Falling), Echo (Reflection), Lunette, Nebka, Parabolic, Blowout, Compound and Complex
Booming or Singing— from the contents page of Dune Worlds: How Windblown Sand Shapes Planetary Landscapes by Ralph D. Lorenz, James R. Zimbelman (2014)
When I was a child, before I was like this, I watched a ski-jumping competition. And one thing keeps coming back: those men going through the air. I looked at their faces. I wish you could see that.from Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit by Werner Herzog (1971)
In all the years I have spent standing or sitting on the banks of [the Mackenzie river], I have learned this: the more knowledge I have, the greater becomes the mystery of what holds that knowledge together, this reticulated miracle called an ecosystem. The longer I watch the river, the more amazed I become (afraid, actually, sometimes) at the confidence of those people who after a few summer seasons here are ready to tell the county commissioners, emphatically, what the river is, to scribe its meaning for the outlander.
Firsthand knowledge is enormously time consuming to acquire; with its dallying and lack of end points, it is also out of phase with the short-term demands of modern life. It teaches humility and fallibility, and so represents an antithesis to progress. It makes a stance of awe in the witness of natural process seem appropriate, and attempts at summary knowledge naive.— Barry Lopez
It is only in the desert that we can pay a visit to death and afterwards return to the land of the living.from an essay by Ibrahim al-Koni for Myth and Landscape by David Parker (2014).
A place has preconditions, and one of the preconditions is water, and the lack of water in the desert makes it impossible to settle there, so the desert becomes a place of absence, a place that is the shadow of another place...
Here was the centre of the world, the sun swung round us; we rode at night straight away into the space of the stars. On a dry summer night, when there was no dew, I used to lie down on my back at full length (looking to the east), on the grass footpath by the orchard, and gaze up into the sky. This is the only way to get at it and feel the stars: while you stand upright, the eye, and through the eye, the mind, is biased by the usual aspect of things: the house there, the trees yonder; it is difficult to forget the mere appearance of rising and setting. Looking straight up like this, from the path to the stars, it was clear and evident that I was really riding among them; they were not above, nor all round, but I was in the midst of them. There was no underneath, no above: everything was on a level with me; the sense of measurement and distance disappeared. As one walks in a wood, with trees all about, so then by day (when the light only hid them) I walked amongst the stars. I had not got then to leave this world to enter space: I was already there.— from The Old House at Coate by Richard Jefferies, quoted by Rebecca Welshman
I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.— Henry David Thoreau
It struck me all of this biological diversity, all of these wonderful and amazing and alien things that other species can do, is like an extension of our own brains. There is so much imagination out there that we simply could not come up with on our own. We can think of [nature] as a pool of imagination and creativity from which we as humans are able to draw. And when we [drain] that pool we deeply impoverish ourselves: we are doing harm to our own ability to think and to dream.J B MacKinnon on RadioLab (here at 19'20")
A politics with no biology...is a vision of the gates of Hell.
