Loren Eiseley, Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos, Volume One: The Immense Journey; The Firmament of Time; The Unexpected Universe; Uncollected Prose, edited by William Cronon (New York: Library of America, 2016) (From The Lost Notebooks: "Every one of us is a hidden child. We are hidden in our beginnings--in the vagaries of the genetic cards that have been dealt out to us by nature; we are hidden in the episodes of our individual lives, environments, events unduplicable that have aided or ineradicably scarred us. We manhole come form poverty or riches,but ironically this tells us another either, for on occasion it ma be the rich child who has suffered trauma and the poor now who has achieved insight,and balance. It is not always so, nor do I give this last as a nostrum or a desirable ripe for success. I merely say to begin with that life is infinitely complex and hidden. We share together some elements of a complicated culture and a language, which, while common to all of us,whispers t to each of us secret meanings, depending upon the live we have led. Our diverging roads begin before birth and intensify afterwards." Id. at 435, 451-452. "No, it is not because I am filled with obscure guilt that I step gently over, and not upon, an autumn cricket. It is not because of guilt that I refuse to shoot the last osprey from her nest in the tide marsh. I possess empathy; I have grown with man in his mind's growing. I share that sympathy and compassion which extends beyond the barriers of class and race and form until it partakes of the universal whole. I am not ashamed to profess this emotion, nor will I call it a pathology. Only through this experience many time repeated and enhanced does man become truly human. Only then will his gun arm be forever lowered. I pray that it may sometime be so." Id. at 454.).
Loren Eiseley, Collected Essays on Evolution, Nature, and the Cosmos, Volume Two: The Invisible Pyramid; The Night Country; Essay from The Star Thrower, edited by William Cronon (New York: Library of America, 2016) (From "The Lethal Factor": "he past century's seen such great accession of knowledge in relation to these natural events, as well as a growing consciousness of man's exposure to similar dangers, that there is an increasing tendency to speculate upon our own possibilities for survival. The great life web which man has increasingly plucked with an abruptness unusual in nature shows signs of 'violence in the return,' to use a phrase of Francis Bacon's. The juvenile optimism about progress which characterized our first scientific years was beginning early in this [twentieth] century to be replaced by doubts which the widely circulated Decline of the zest by Oswald Spengler documents only too well. As the poet J. C. Squire says, we can turn 'the great wheel backward until Troy unburn / . . . and seven Troys below / Rise out of death and dwindle . . .' We can go down through the layers of dead cities until the gold become stone, until the jewels become shells, until the place is a hovel, until the hovel becomes a heap of gnawed bones." "Are the comparisons valid? The historians differ> Is there hope? A babble of conflicting voices confuses us Are we safe? On this point I am sure that every person of cultivation and intelligence would answer with a resounding 'No!' Spengler--not the optimist--was right in prophesying that this [twentieth] century would be one marked by the rise of dictators, great wars, and augmented racial troubles. Whether he was also right in foreseeing this [twentieth] century as the onsetting winter of Western civilization is a more difficult problem." Id. at 415, 417. QUERY: Are not these concerns more pressing now, in the twenty-first century? Are we not seeing the rise of authoritarian rulers, racial and ethnic animosity? Is not winter coming to Western Civilization?).
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, introduction by Richard Keynes (London; The Folio Society, 2006).
Michael McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (New York: New York Review Book Classics, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Arguing that neither sustainable development nor ecosystem services have provided adequate defense against pollution, habitat destruction, species degradation, and climate change, McCarthy asks us to consider nature as an intrinsic good and an emotional and spiritual resource, capable of inspiring joy, wonder, and even love." Also, see Andrea Wulf, "Saving nature, for the Joy of It." NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/23/2016.).
