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The Dreamscape of Our Future
Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration in the moist breath of decay.
To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night - brothers who see now they are truly brothers.
Riders on Earth Together
Brothers in Eternal Cold, 1968
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
Suquamish, and allied Indian tribes
Letter to President Franklin Pierce, 1854
[Published in Brother Eagle, Sister Sky: A Message from Chief Seattle, 1990; it was shown in 1992 to have been largely a forgery by television scriptwriter Ted Perry for a historical epic in 1971. The sentiment, nevertheless, stands incontrovertable.]
The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.
Dinner in Los Angeles, 1989
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
The Human Condition, 1958
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say, "I want to see the manager."
The Adding Machine, 1985
As we begin to comprehend that the earth itself is a kind of manned spaceship hurtling through the infinity of space -- it will seem increasingly absurd that we have not better organized the life of the human family.
Speech, 26 September 1966
Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess creature who resembles everybody's mom in that she knows what's best for us. But if you look at the historical record -- Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages -- you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?
The Worst Years of Our Lives
The Great Syringe Tide, 1991
Is it possible that I am not alone in believing that in the dispute between Galileo and the Church, the Church was right and the centre of man's universe is the earth?
Rules of the Game, 1970
Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.
Let Me Enjoy the Earth
In this broad earth of ours,
Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,
Enclosed and safe within its central heart,
Nestles the seed perfection.
Song of the Universal
God owns heaven, but He craves the earth.
The Awful Rowing Toward God
The Earth, 1975
The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit -- not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviæ from their graves ... You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into.
Walden, Spring, 1854
The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.
Letter to State Governors
26 February 1937
