“Once your baby tree is in the ground, check it daily, because the first three years are critical. Remember that you are your tree's only friend in a hostile world.” SciencePalmsTreesOaksAspensPinesPlant Trees Book:Lab Girl Source: Lab Girl
“The initial planting of seedlings at the start of a forestry study represents a weary victory, won by a stoic researcher with a strong sense of fatalism. This unique intellectual agony shapes the character of the tree experimentalist and selects for those with a religious devotion to science. Patient, with overtones of masochism.” ScienceResearchers Book:Lab Girl Source: Lab Girl
“Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not. Roads have grow like a manic fungus and the endless miles of ditches that bracket these roads serve as hasty graves for perhaps millions of plant species extinguished in the name of progress. Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less then six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age.” ScienceTrees Environment Book:Lab Girl Source: Lab Girl
“There is no time to discuss the fact that this horrible, horrible system is not working, or to assert that we are neither criminals or machines. There are only endless medication orders, given by exhausted people with nobody better than us to depend on.” ScienceLaboratoryPharmaceutical Industry Book:Lab Girl Source: Lab Girl