Process Which Plants Quotes & Sayings

Plants began the process of land colonization about 450 million years ago, accompanied of necessity by tiny mites and other organisms which they needed to break down and recycle dead organic matter on their behalf. Larger animals took a little longer to emerge, but by about 400 million years ago they were venturing out of the water, too. Popular illustrations have encouraged us to envision the first venturesome land dwellers as a kind of ambitious fish - something like the modern mudskipper, which can hop from puddle to puddle during droughts - or even as a fully formed amphibian. In fact, the first visible mobile residents on dry land were probably much more like modern woodlice, sometimes also known as pillbugs or sow bugs. These are the little bugs (crustaceans, in fact) that are commonly thrown into confusion when you upturn a rock or log. — Bill Bryson

The power to assimilate crude inorganic matter as it is found in the soil, and convert it into living protoplasm and other organic substances, or to use such substances in performing physiological function, does not belong to the animal organism. It is the office of plant life or vegetation to convert the primary elements from their crude inorganic state into the organic state. This conversion cannot be accomplished by any synthetic process known to the laboratory.
After the plant has raised the crude inorganic matter of the soil into plant protoplasm, the animal may take these and raise them to a still higher plane - that of animal protoplasm. But the animal cannot do the work of the plant. He must get his food either directly or indirectly from the plant kingdom. That is, the animal must either eat the plant or its fruits, or he must eat the animal that has eaten the plant. Food must be in the organic form. Air and water form the only exceptions to this rule. — Herbert M. Shelton

Thermophilic composting requires no electricity and therefore no coal combustion, no acid rain, no nuclear power plants, no nuclear waste, no petrochemicals and no consumption of fossil fuels. The composting process produces no waste, no pollutants and no toxic by-products. Thermophilic composting of humanure can be carried out century after century, millennium after millennium, with no stress on our ecosystems, no unnecessary consumption of resources and no garbage or sludge for our landfills. And all the while it will produce a valuable resource necessary for our survival while preventing the accumulation of dangerous pathogenic waste. — Joseph Jenkins

Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag. — Nadine Gordimer

I've said that education is a living process that can best be compared to agriculture. Gardeners know that they don't make plants grow. — Ken Robinson

As humans, we do get to choose what we eat, and when we choose to eat a plant, we are eating (i.e., harming) just that plant, plus indirectly whatever nutrients that plant consumed over its lifetime (and we are also harming whatever beings may have been living on that plant or who were injured or killed in the harvesting process). But when we eat an animal, we are eating not just that animal, but also indirectly all of the plants and other beings that that animal ate over its lifetime - those plants became the flesh that we eat. — Sharon Gannon

The Arabs understandably did everything they could to protect their monopoly. Coffee beans were treated before being shipped to ensure they were sterile and could not be used to seed new coffee plants; foreigners were excluded from coffee-producing areas. First to break the Arab monopoly were the Dutch, who displaced the Portuguese as the dominant European nation in the East Indies during the seventeenth century, gaining control of the spice trade in the process and briefly becoming the world's leading commercial power. — Tom Standage

Why? Because we're very well down this process as it is - flawed as it is - and we're counting on getting more power plants on line by the end of 2003 so we have a surplus of power. — Gray Davis

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research. The place for dismemberment is called a university. — Aldo Leopold

CHARLES PERROW is a sociologist known for studying industrial accidents, such as those that occur with nuclear power plants, airlines, and shipping. In Normal Accidents, he wrote that We construct an expected world because we can't handle the complexity of the present one, and then process the information that fits the expected world, and find reasons to exclude the information that might contradict it. Unexpected or unlikely interactions are ignored when we make our construction. — Laurence Gonzales

The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative - not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury - strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We are told that the first part of the process is to select the very smallest seeds from the smallest plants, which is not at all unlikely, but I cannot speak to the fact from my own observation. — Robert Fortune

This process is called artificial selection. In the case of the Heike crab it was effected more or less unconsciously by the fishermen, and certainly without any serious contemplation by the crabs. But humans have deliberately selected which plants and animals shall live and which shall die for thousands of years. — Carl Sagan

Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural, selection, but from the flower's point of view, this is a distinction without a difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with more offspring. — Michael Pollan

But if humans can make new varieties of plants and animals, must not nature do so also? This related process is called natural selection. That life has changed fundamentally over the aeons is entirely clear from the alterations we have made in the beasts and vegetables during the short tenure of humans on Earth, and from the fossil evidence. — Carl Sagan

Ultimately, the only wealth that can sustain any community, economy or nation is derived from the photosynthetic process - green plants growing on regenerating soil. — Allan Savory

Whole plants differ in their effects from refined drugs ( ... Plants are dilute preparations (of) the active principles ... Plants usually go into the body through the mouth and stomach, whereas purified chemicals can be put ... by snorting or injecting ... directly into ... bloodstreams without giving ... bodies a chance to process them. Other compounds in drug plants ... may modify the active principles, making them safer ... — Andrew Weil

W. Edwards Deming, the chief instigator of the Total Quality Management movement that revolutionized manufacturing, told a story about a company that used a variety of flammable products in its production process. Unsurprisingly, fires frequently broke out in its plants. But the president of the company didn't think he had a situation problem; he thought he had a person problem. He sent a letter to every one of the company's 10,500 employees, pleading with them to set fewer fires. Ahem. (What — Chip Heath

Tragically, some people are genetically more susceptible than others to agripoisons and industrial pollutants. Genetic engineering to correct these medical problems is a narrow (reductionistic) and instrumental (mechanistic) response to a problem that is fundamentally conceptual: namely, our attitude toward life and our mistreatment of the Earth, plants, and animals-and ourselves in the process. — Michael Fox

His bowels, far greater alchemist than he had ever been, regularly performed the transmutation of corpses, those of beasts and of plants, into living matter, separating the useful from the dross without help from him. Ignis inferioris Naturae: those spirals of brown mud, precisely coiled and still steaming from the decocting process which they have undergone in their mold, this ammoniac and nitric fluid passed into a clay pot, were the visible and fetid proof of work completed in laboratories where we do not intervene. It seemed to Zeno that the disgust of fastidious persons at this refuse, and the obscene laughter of the ignorant, were due less to the fact that these objects offend our senses than to our horror in the presence of the mysterious and ineluctable routines of our bodies. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Methods of detoxifying and processing plants for human use are known throughout the world, and include a variety of techniques, including dehydration, application of heat, leaching, and fermentation, among others (Johns and Kubo 1988). While it is difficult to trace the origins of these methods, or to answer the questions of how certain groups learned to detoxify and process useful plants in their environment, to make a blanket claim that certain cultures were incapable of discovering plant properties, and the methods necessary for rendering them same and useful, seems naive at best. — John Rush

described my tomatoes and growing process to Alan (the tomato guru). He thought I might be watering my plants too much. When I wailed, "How can anyone tell what the right amount is?" He said, "You let them suffer. Hold off on the water until they just start to wilt - and then you save them. Suffer and save. — Spring Warren

John Laroche: You know why I like plants?
Susan Orlean: Nuh uh.
John Laroche: Because they're so mutable. Adaptation is a profound process. Means you figure out how to thrive in the world.
Susan Orlean: [pause] Yeah but it's easier for plants. I mean they have no memory. They just move on to whatever's next. With a person though, adapting almost shameful. It's like running away. — Charlie Kaufman

Man as an organism is to the world outside like a whirlpool is to a river: man and world are a single natural process, but we are behaving as if we were invaders and plunderers in a foreign territory. For when the individual is defined and felt as the separate personality or ego, he remains unaware that his actual body is a dancing pattern of energy that simply does not happen by itself. It happens only in concert with myriads of other patterns - called animals, plants, insects, bacteria, minerals, liquids, and gases. The definition of a person and the normal feeling of "I" do not effectively include these relationships. You say, "I came into this world." You didn't; you came out of it, as a branch from a tree. — Alan W. Watts

Eventually decomposition strips you bare, even in that solid oak you've taken the shape of. You've helped, finally, to enrich something around you, by feeding the soil with your skin and fat and muscle. Now the soil is full of phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and especially nitrogen. Now the soil is supremely satisfied, and you'd be okay with that. You always did like growing things. You always were better with plants than people. — Amber Sparks

The difference is an objective phenomenon of soil science; what we call "soil" is a community of living, mostly microscopic organisms in a nutrient matrix. Organic farming, by definition, enhances the soil's living and nonliving components. Modern conventional farming is an efficient reduction of that process that adds back just a few crucial nutrients of the many that are removed each year when biomass is harvested ... Chemicals that sterilize the soil destroy organisms that fight plant diseases, aerate, and manufacture fertility. Recent research has discovered that just adding phosphorus (the P in all "NPK" fertilizers) kills the tiny filaments of fungi that help plants absorb nutrients. — Barbara Kingsolver

All experience is a drug experience. Whether it's mediated by our own [endogenous] drugs, or whether it's mediated by substances that we ingest that are found in plants, cognition, consciousness, the working of the brain, it's all a chemically mediated process. Life itself is a drug experience. — Dennis McKenna

It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man; and it is an easier faith that plants and animals may dwindle down into an elemental atom, than that this atom should embrace in its organization, and evolve, all the noble forms of vegetable, animal, and intellectual life. — David Brewster

We translated the script together with them. And during the process of translation, they rewrote the scripts. They put a lot into it. They made it their own. There are names of plants or chants or certain rites and everything that you cannot come across it in a movie. You know, you cannot learn about them casually. So the film doesn't have value in the ethnographical, anthropological. It's fiction. — Ciro Guerra

...no matter how rhapsodic one waxes about the process of wresting edible plants and tamed animals from the sprawling vagaries of nature, there's a timeless, unwavering truth espoused by those who worked the land for ages: no matter how responsible agriculture is, it is essentially about achieving the lesser of evils. To work the land is to change the land, to shape it to benefit one species over another, and thus necessarily to tame what is wild. Our task should be to deliver our blows gently. — James McWilliams

We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process. — Svetlana Alexievich