I note and classify even small changes: a shrew darting across the path, an updraft twisting a fern frond, a hummingbird gathering spiderweb for its nest. Suddenly, nature is not the backdrop to life, it is life itself, and I am no longer myself, but myself in nature. My senses come alive: I taste the air, listen for sounds beneath the wind. When I walk in a place like Yellowstone, it’s always with a slight but solemn recognition of the slender possibility that I will die, that some wild animal will kill me. “As a boy, I sometimes sat down from my wandering only to wake up an hour later, surprised to find I had fallen asleep in a warm patch of grass. The Day the World Stops Shopping: How Ending Consumerism Saves the Environment and Ourselves 'If you don't think that way,' he said at last, 'what kind of passion do you have for human life?” Kurokawa became speechless with awe at the brilliance of the deep-time vision. It's a green respite, where a sense of calm prevails and there's clean air for your lungs-and it is surrounded to the horizon on every side by the megalopolis of Toyko. Today the mature forest covers a slow-rising hill alongside Harajuku subway station. No one involved in the planning would live to see the final outcome. Over a hundred years, a broad-leaf woods of oak, chinquapin and camphor trees would rise to become an untended forest. The forester planned out the project in stages, beginning with a hundred thousand young trees that would be planted around the few existing pines. At the time, the area they selected was marshy farmland on the outskirts of the city. He offered one more history lesson: in 1915, Tokyo decided to commemorate their recently deceased emperor with a Shinto shrine and sacred forest. “Does Kurokawa feel that deep-time thinking in business is better than short-term thinking? He is an even-minded person, and I admit that I expected him to reply that both are important. The Once and Future World: Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be The seemingly slow, ambling walk of bears was referred to as “slothing.” Ordinary life in the past had an intimacy with other species that today we mainly associate with trained biologists and dedicated naturalists.” Venery’s description of animal sounds was poetic, but also accurate: weasels really do “squeak,” mice really do “cheep.” Goldfinches chirm, boars girn, starlings murmur, geese creak. The lark’s habit of flying into the air to sing was known as “exalting.” The nocturnal song of nightingales was called “watching,” from the idea of keeping a watch through the darkness. The true language of venery, however, did more than describe beasts by the bunch it richly evoked their behavior. “We remember England’s “terms of venery”- the jargon of hunting- for giving us specific words for groups of animals, such as a school of fish or a pride of lions, and also for such quaintly forgotten phrases as “a tiding of magpies” and “a kindle of cats.” Experts suggest that many of the terms that amuse us today-“ an unkindness of ravens,” “a shrewdness of apes,” “a disworship of Scots”- were fanciful even in their own time and never in common use.
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