Our Beloved Earth

"The man who does not know nature, who does not walk under the leaves as under his own roof, is partial and wounded. I say this even as wilderness and our indifference, Nature there will always be, but it will not be what we have now, much less the deeper fields and woodlands many of us remember from our childhood. The worlds of van Gogh and Turner and Winslow Homer, and Wordsworth too, and Frost and Jeffers and Whitman, are gone, and will not return. We can come to our senses yet, and rescue the world, but we will never return it to anything like its original form."

--Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems