To add a book to our list of favorites, send us an e-mail message with your name, address, and telephone number. Provide the authors' full names, full book title, publisher, edition, and year published. If you like, send along one or two of your favorite quotes. Try to limit your choices to books about creeks, the environment, urban design, grassroots action, or Bay Area history:
"When we run out of country, we will run out of stories. When we run out of stories, we will run out of sanity." "Even a child standing on the porch in Houston with the rain in his face can look north and know that it is all tied together, that we are the warblers, we are the zone-tailed hawks, we are the underground river: that it is all holy, and that some of it should not be allowed to disappear, as has so much, and so many of us, already." Excerpts from Rick Bass, On Willow Creek.
"Dragonflies are best viewed on a calm, sunny day. When it is windy or cool they tend to hide away and await improved weather. The best opportunities to view them will usually be near a pond, stream or river although they can fly miles away from the waters from which they emerged when searching for food; indeed, some even migrate!"
"Bad rules and destructive guidelines have accrued during 50 years of automobile-oriented planning. Professions have grown up to perpetuate them. Urban planners. Architects and engineers. Traffic engineers. Retail consultants. Real estate developers. These professionals have a stake in keeping the public believing in their expertise. But the so-called experts too often ignore or deny the legitimacy of local citizen instincts, common sense, and accumulated wisdom. They are so often focused on their own area of expertise that they overlook, ignore, and misjudge the web of interrelated impacts. Experts too often want to 'educate' people instead of 'learn from' and be 'educated by' them." "Wildflower meadows are sustainable landscapes. . . . Meadows enhance awareness of seasonal changes and expose surrounding vistas. Meadows that consist of native vegetation also provide important habitat and food for wildlife." "People can learn much about the interactions of plants, wildlife, and the land from observing a meadow over time. Meadows change." "Wildflower meadows that replace conventional turf grass offer three principal benefits: ecological, economic, and aesthetic." "If we are to forge new links to the land, we must resist the extinction of experience. We must save not only the wilderness but the vacant lots, the ditches as well as the canyonlands, and the woodlots along with the old growth." "Even if they don't know 'my' ditch, most people I speak with seem to have a ditch somewhere¾or a creek, meadow, woodlot, or marsh¾that they hold in similar regard. These are places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails, and a sense of place gets under our skin. They are the secondhand lands, the hand-me-down habitats where you have to look hard to find something to love." "Little losses add up to big losses. . . . [T]he loss of neighborhood species endangers our experience of nature. If a species becomes extinct within our own radius of reach (smaller for the very old, very young, disabled, and poor), it might as well be gone altogether . . . . To those whose access suffers by it, local extinction has much the same result as global eradication." |
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