Quotes & Sayings About Grasslands

The mutualistic relationships between bees, the flowers that they pollinate, and the bacteria that live within the roots of those plants are at the heart of the functioning of a natural, species-rich meadow. The problem is that these relationships can be ruined by application of a sack of fertiliser, which allows the grasses to swamp the legumes and other wild flowers, swiftly resulting in a bright green, flowerless sward, with no legumes, no Rhizombium, and no bees. In the farming world this is known as "improved" grassland. In the 1940's Britain had in the region 15 million acres of flower rich grasslands. It is hard to get precise figures, but about 250,000 acres remain; a staggering loss of over 98 percent. Fertilisers were cheap, and successive governments were keen to persuade farmers to boost productivity, so ecosystems that had taken hundreds of years to develop were subject to swift and wholesale destruction. — Dave Goulson

Since its sudden birth the city had expanded, swallowing up acre upon acre of the surrounding grasslands and drawing thousands into its domain. Hardly built on the most advantageous ground, miles from the open waters, decades from the mines at the mountain summits, it yet remained the only settlement of note on the isle. This sprawling mass of a city, once a compact kingdom, was now the keystone of the Castilian Empire. — R.D. Shanks

I forded the Santa Fe below Fort White and headed south across the Alachua Prairie where the early Indians and Spaniards ran their cattle. To the east that early morning, strange dashes of red color shone through the blowing tops of prairie sedges where the sun touched the crowns of sandhill cranes. Their wild horn and hollow rattle drifted back on a fresh wind as the big birds drifted over the savanna. That blood-red glint of life in the brown grasslands, that long calling
why should such fleeting moments pierce the heart? And yet they do. That was what Charlie my Darling made me see. They do. — Peter Matthiessen

When politicians like Sen. Joseph Lieberman target video game violence, perhaps it is to distract attention from the material conditions that give rise to a culture of domestic violence, the economic policies that make it harder for most of us to own our own homes, and the development practices which pave over the old grasslands and forests. Video games did not make backyard play spaces disappear; rather, they offer children some way to respond to domestic confinement. — Henry Jenkins

I want to stretch our legs and show you the view of our valley. It's a tradition when we bring someone special to the ranch for the first time." He set the kitten on the seat opposite them and opened the door. He stepped out, then helped her to the ground and started to release her.
Pamela squeezed his hand and didn't let go.
John's quick smile told her he approved. He led her to a lookout and waved an arm in a sweeping motion. "Our valley."
"Really?" Delighted, she leaned forward to take in the view. Grasslands studded with cattle surrounded a big white house, outbuildings, a barn, and two smaller homes. She studied the house. From this distance, it looked large and comfortable, two-story, as John had described, with a porch across the front. She relaxed at the sight.
The distant mountains still held snow on their peaks. Stark blue sky stretched over the land, with several puffy white clouds floating by. Our valley, she echoed. — Debra Holland

Lasher,' she said, 'for the wind which you send that lashes the grasslands, for the wind that lashes the leaves from the trees. — Anne Rice

Kami," said Holly, seeming stricken with a sudden terrible thought. "Please be subtle."

"Totally," said Kami. "You can rely on me absolutely. I will have the stealth of a lioness stalking the grasslands. In this metaphor Angela is an antelope, and she'll never know what hit her."

Holly did not look reassured.

"I promise you, Holly, 'Subtle' would be my middle name, except I'm too subtle to have a middle name that's such a giveaway. You don't have to worry about a thing. — Sarah Rees Brennan

Everything in physiology follows the rule that too much can be as bad as too little. There are optimal points of allostatic balance. For example, while a moderate amount of exercise generally increases bone mass, thirty-year-old athletes who run 40 to 50 miles a week can wind up with decalcified bones, decreased bone mass, increased risk of stress fractures and scoliosis (sideways curvature of the spine) - their skeletons look like those of seventy-year-olds. To put exercise in perspective, imagine this: sit with a group of hunter-gatherers from the African grasslands and explain to them that in our world we have so much food and so much free time that some of us run 26 miles in a day, simply for the sheer pleasure of it. They are likely to say, "Are you crazy? That's stressful." Throughout hominid history, if you're running 26 miles in a day, you're either very intent on eating someone or someone's very intent on eating you. — Robert M. Sapolsky

We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.
(pg. 73, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine") — Wendell Berry

They rode for days through the rain and they rode through rain and hail and rain again. In that gray storm light they crossed a flooded plain with the footed shapes of the horses reflected in the water among clouds and mountains and the riders slumped forward and rightly skeptic of the shimmering cities on the distant shore of that sea whereon they trod miraculous. They climbed up through rolling grasslands where small birds shied away chittering down the wind and a buzzard labored up from among bones with wings that went whoop whoop whoop like a child's toy swung on a string and in the long red sunset the sheets of water on the plain below them lay like tidepools of primal blood. — Cormac McCarthy

I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa gave us the model for all religions to follow. And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climatic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science. In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neurosis, and-if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament-planetary catastrophe. — Terence McKenna

Jungles and grasslands are the logical destinations, and towns and farmland the labyrinths that people have imposed between them sometime in the past. I cherish the green enclaves accidentally left behind. — Edward O. Wilson

Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrially raised chickens poisons the Chesapeake; the Amazon has been slashed and burned for soy
and don't even mention seafood. To this bunch of herpetologists, the sin of ordering shrimp lay in the bycatch
young fish, and especially sea turtles, caught in the nets and discarded, dead or dying. — Joe Roman

I grew up with landscape as a recourse, with the possibility of exiting the horizontal realm of social relations for a vertical alignment with earth and sky, matter and spirit. Vast open spaces speak best to this craving, the spaces I myself first found in the desert and then in the western grasslands. — Rebecca Solnit

It was passed on by the hook-nosed herdsmen of the grasslands, from the dwellers in tents to the dwellers in the squat stone cities where kings with curled blueblack beards worshipped round-bellied gods with curious rites. — Robert E. Howard

I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems, the oceans, the rainforests, the soil, the grasslands, and all other living things will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it. — Jerry Brown

To many people I have no doubt that it appears merely silly. I once found it expressed in a rather amusing way in a Russian Book called Dal Zoviet, which means the lure of far horizons. The author is Galinischev Kutuzoff [Golenischev-Kutuzov], and he tells of a man in Northern Mongolia who goes out of his yurt every morning to breathe the free air of the steppes and enjoy the immensity and the solitude. But one day he feels an uncomfortable sense of oppression, almost as if he could not breathe. He looks about to find the reason. And there, across the undulating grasslands, is a line of telegraph poles. And after the place never the same to him again. — Daniele Vare

When our earliest human ancestors left the trees and moved to the open grasslands of the savanna, they adopted an upright stance. Possessing already this powerful visual system, they could see far into the distance (giraffes and elephants might stand taller, but their eyes are on the sides, giving them instead panoramic vision). This allowed them to spot dangerous predators far away on the horizon and detect their movements even in twilight. Given a few seconds or minutes, they could plot a safe retreat. At the same time, if they focused on what was nearest at hand, they could identify all kinds of important details in their environment - footprints and signs of passing predators, or the colors and shapes of rocks that they could pick up and perhaps use as tools. — Robert Greene

I am told that in the heart of a vast, bowl-shaped valley deep inside the High Pamir where the sheep and the goats spend their summers grazing by the hundreds as far as the eye can see, there is a cold blue stream that meanders through emerald meadows until it spills into a small lake that carries the color of the sky and that the surface of this lake and the surrounding grasslands shiver in unison beneath the movement of a wind that never stops blowing. — Greg Mortenson

By 2050, at bio-extinction's current rate, between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of all species will have disappeared or be too few in numbers to survive. There'll be a few over-visited parks, the coral reefs will be beaten up, grasslands overgrazed. Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas. — Stuart L. Pimm

For the Mongols, the lifestyle of the peasant seemed incomprehensible. The Jurched territory was filled with so many people and yet so few animals; this was a stark contrast to Mongolia, where there were normally five to ten animals for each human. To the Mongols, the farmers' fields were just grasslands, as were the gardens, and the peasants were like grazing animals rather than real humans who ate meat. The Mongols referred to these grass-eating people with the same terminology that they used for cows and goats. The masses of peasants were just so many herds, and when the soldiers went out to round up their people or to drive them away, they did so with the same terminology, precision, and emotion used in rounding up yaks. — Jack Weatherford

Though we have been stuffing them into classrooms and cubicles for decades, our brains actually were built to survive in jungles and grasslands. A lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary. — John Medina