Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.
Biophilia: the innate pleasure from living abundance and diversity as manifested by the human impulse to imitate Nature with gardens.
Research suggests that exposure to the natural world - including nearby nature in cities - helps improve human health, well-being, and intellectual capacity in ways that science is only recently beginning to understand.
I don't think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There's very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There's an elegant quality to the wild mind.
Natural selection shaped the human brain to be drawn toward aspects of nature that enhance our survival and reproduction, like verdant landscapes and docile creatures. There is no payoff to getting the warm fuzzies in the presence of rats, snakes, mosquitoes, cockroaches, herpes simplex and the rabies virus.
If I find a green meadow splashed with daisies and sit down beside a clear-running brook, I have found medicine. It soothes my hurts as well as when I sat in my mother's lap in infancy, because the Earth really is my mother, and the green meadow is her lap.
Increasingly the evidence suggests that people benefit so much from contact with nature that land conservation can now be viewed as a public health strategy.
As the young spend less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically and this reduces the richness of human experience we need contact with nature.
There must be provision for the child to have contact with nature; to understand and appreciate the order, the harmony and the beauty in nature.
I love a tree more than a man.
Nature often seems like an idea that has had its day.
We are all born bonded to nature; that's why we put depictions of flowers and forests, rather than bulldozers or log piles, on our walls.
Only when there is a wilderness can man harmonize his inner being with the wavelengths of the earth. When the earth, its products, its creatures, become his concern, man is caught up in a cause greater than his own life and more meaningful. Only when man loses himself in an endeavor of that magnitude does he walk and live with humanity and reverence.
I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity.
We are a species that has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look, and listen.
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?
You must converse much with the field and the woods if you would imbibe such health into your mind and spirit as you covet for your body
If we could, and we must, establish a deep long abiding relationship with nature, with the actual trees, the bushes, the flowers, the grass and the fast moving clouds, then we would never slaughter another human being for any reason whatsoever.
We as a culture are forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this very, very deep connection and contact with nature. You can’t divorce civilization from nature - we totally depend on it.
Only spread a fern-frond over a man's head and worldly cares are cast out, and freedom and beauty and peace come in.
To grow up in intimate association with nature - animal and vegetable - is an irreplaceable form of wealth and culture.
If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity.
It were happy if we studied nature more in natural things; and acted according to nature, whose rules are few, plain, and most reasonable.
Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.
A man who lives with nature is used to violence and is companionable with death. There is more violence in an English hedgerow than in the meanest streets of a great city.
