Home / Quotes / Quote by Hal Borland

Quote by Hal Borland

“All man has to do is cooperate with the big forces, the sun, the rain, the growing urge. Seeds sprout, stems grow, leaves spread in the sunlight. Man plants, weeds, cultivates and harvests. It sounds simple, and it is simple, with the simplicity of great truths.”

Quote by Hal Borland

Author

Hal Borland was an American author known for his profound insights into nature and his beautiful prose. His works often depict the life and natural landscapes of the American countryside with concise and profound language. more

You May Also Like

“Corn is the hero of its own story, and though we humans played a crucial supporting role in its rise to world domination, it would be wrong to suggest we have been calling the shots, or acting always in our own best interests. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that corn has succeeded in domesticating us.”

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World

“Each opening bud, and care-perfected seed, Is as a page, where we may read of God.”

May Care Pages Plant Seeds Opening Bud

Author:Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps

“Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and stored in the form of complex carbon molecules. A food chain is a system for passing those calories on to species that lack the pant's unique ability to synthesize them from sunlight.”

“Grass is the forgiveness of nature-her constant benediction. Fields trampled with battle, saturated with blood, torn with the ruts of cannon, grow green again with grass and carnage is forgotten. Streets abandoned by traffic become grass-grown, like rural lanes and are obliterated. Forests decay, harvests perish, flowers vanish, but grass is immortal.”

Source: Selections from the Writings of John J. Ingalls

“Green, the color of growth, or surgent life, enwraps the land. New green, still as individual as the plants themselves. Cool green, which will merge as the weeks pass, the Summer comes, into a canopy of shade of busy chlorophyll.”

Stills Individual Growth Week Land Color Summer Green Plant Busy Shade Canopy

Author:Hal Borland

“Men swagger around calling themselves "cattlemen" but abuse their grass like a rapist. And abuse their cattle with concrete fecal feedlots without any regards to rumen function. Vegetable growers plow thousands of acres, planting monocrops of annuals in a never-ending tillage routine that totally annihilates carbon wealth. Why? Why are we so enamored of things that destroy carbon and disrespect the animals under our care? Grass. Lowly grass. It just gets no respect. And yet it is the lifeblood of the planet.”

Men Care Wealth Animal Planets Calling Abuse Function Regard Plant Grass Routine Vegetables Concrete Carbon Disrespect Cattle Never Ending Annuals Acres Swagger No Respect Enamored

Author:Joel Salatin

“Of all the everyday plants of the earth, grass is the least pretentious and the most important to mankind. It clothes the earth is an unmistakable way. Directly or indirectly it provides the bulk of man's food, his meat, his bread, every scrap of his cereal diet. Without grass we would all starve, we and all our animals. And what a dismal place this world would be!”

Men World Way Important Would Be Earth Animal Mankind This World Clothes Plant Everyday Bread Grass Meat Diets Scrap Pretentious Cereal

Author:Hal Borland

“Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.”

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World

“The unlimited capacity of the plant world to sustain man at his highest is a region as yet unexplored by modern science.”

Men World Modern Highest Capacity Plant Environmental Regions Sustainability Unlimited Modern Science Unexplored

Book:India of My Dreams

Source: India of My Dreams

“The wealth of any ecosystem is its perennials. The primal herbivore-predator-disturbance-rest dance is literally the breath and pulse of the earth. Grasses recycle oxygen far more efficiently than trees. The turnover is faster. Grass reaches out and turns solar energy into carbon. Tillage hyper-aerates the soil, burning out carbon. But because a plant creates bilateral symmetry at the soil horizon, it sloughs off root mass when the top gets chopped off.”