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Quotes about Forests from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"As they have for centuries, indigenous rainforest tribes around the world rely on the forests for virtually all their medicines. They too have incorporated herbs into their religions and everyday lives. Researchers estimate that the world's rainforests contain literally thousands of potentially useful medicinal plants. Rainforests exist on every continent, though most research attention is currently directed at the rainforests of South America, particularly in the Amazon, and of the South Pacific Islands." - Phyllis A. Balch, CNC, Prescription for Nutritional Healing, 4th Edition: A Practical A-to-Z Reference to Drug-Free Remedies Using Vitamins, Minerals, Herbs & Food Supplements (Get the book.)

"Expanding the "frontier of cultivation" was not an • William Ruddiman of the University of Virginia believes that the clear-cutting of the great European forests is the beginning of the long history of human-caused increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, a reaction to "massive human mortality accompanying pandemics" option available in either the built-out lands of the Mediterranean or the deserts that surrounded Mesopotamia. Only western Europe possessed the topographic advantage of a potentially arable frontier, in the form of the great European forests." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.)

"Another factor to consider in the decision whether or not to eat meat is its ecological impact. forests and rainforests are being destroyed all over the world to raise farm animals, especially cattle. Our limited fresh water is being depleted. Soon, our land may be covered in desert largely as a result of meat eating! While eating meat, at least raw meat, may be in the best health interest for some individuals, it is not in the best interest of an overpopulated planet. Within decades, eating meat will likely become a luxury only the wealthy can afford. For most of the world, it already is." - Susan E. Schenck, The Live Food Factor: The Comprehensive Guide to the Ultimate Diet for Body, Mind, Spirit & Planet (Get the book.)

"Additionally, the region is characterized by a rapid transition between the humid mountain forests of the Andes and the dry, deciduous forests and deserts of the Peruvian lowlands. Considerable progress has been made in the overall taxonomic treatment of the flora of the country as a whole l1-2-34!. However, the southern part of the country is relatively unexplored. The first floristic studies were conducted in the 1940s(5f>1, followed by decades without any further research activity. Until the late 1990s little work had been done on vegetation structure, ecology, and ethnobotany." - Rainer W. Bussmann and Douglas Sharon, Plants of Longevity, The Medicinal Flora of Vilcabamba (Get the book.)

"Holes are appearing in the ozone layer, while forests are disappearing at alarming rates—as are the species that live in them. Seldom in its history has the earth changed so rapidly. The faster the world around us changes, the more we are forced to let go of any cozy notions we might have about the future. No one today can predict with any degree of certainty how things will be in a year, or even in six months." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.) "Not all the forests have disappeared. We need not be, like the dinosaurs, a species that suddenly became extinct—a mere geological relic. There is still hope. We still have the opportunity to redeem ourselves. Number Of Species PAST MAJOR SPECIES EXTINCTIONS Evolutionary Kicks Even if another mass extinction were to occur, all would not be lost. Evolution would still continue. Indeed, if the past is any indication of what we should expect, it would leap ahead. Hard-bodied organisms began to flourish only after the mass marine extinction that ended the Pre-Cambrian Era." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.) "Vegetation would not be able to "migrate" as fast as the changes in climate occur; many temperate forests would vanish, adding further to climatic instability. Areas that we rely upon for much of our food, such as the grain prairies of the U.S., may suddenly become arid. Shifts in climate could also lead to changes in ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream, which circulates heat from the tropics to Western Europe. If this were to occur, countries such as Britain could be in for a dramatic cooling rather than a warming." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.)

"The road snaked up several hundred feet through forests and around tight curves and many unprotected drop-offs that promised a quick death. In America such a road would be illegal—or at least labeled "dangerous." Here it was business as usual. We stopped at a high plateau fenced in by an ancient rock wall where 200 sheep had gnawed vegetation down to nubs. At the highest point of the pasture, a teepee-shaped rock-and-stick structure called a pinnetta commanded a 360-degree view of the property." - Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest (Get the book.)

"But Mischocyttarus immarginatus is most abundant in the dry forests of Guanacaste Province in northwestern Costa Rica, where there is a long and pronounced dry season. The forest here drops its leaves during this season, exposing the Polybia occidentalis nests, which are very conspicuous because of their size and shape. The thousands of fat larvae in these exposed nests become increasingly desirable as populations of many other insects decline, and a variety of birds, both large and small, soon begin to raid the nests." - Adrian Forsyth and Kenneth Miyata, Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rain forests of Central and South America (Get the book.)

"At Las Juntas, three hours north of San Jose, we turned off the Pan-American Highway and drove westward toward through progressively drier and hotter terrain. The forests eventually gave way to cow pastures dotted with humped-back Brahman cattle and occasionally the massively crowned guanacaste trees after which the region is named. We crossed the Taiwan Friendship Bridge spanning the alligator-infested Tempisque River and onto the roughly 80-mile-long finger of land south of the Nicaraguan border along the Pacific coast—the Nicoya Peninsula. " - Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest (Get the book.)

"Susan and Alan Carle have spent nearly three decades undergoing extensive collecting expeditions into endangered forests in order to protect disappearing species that they grow on their Australian property, called the Botanical Ark. Harold Olmo, known as the "Indiana Jones of viticulture" for his grape-collecting adventures in Afghanistan and Iran, once spent three days having his car pulled out of a twenty-five-foot gorge by nomads using camel-hair ropes. The grapes he collected and bred played a major role in creating and sustaining California's wine industry." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.) "The neotropical forests of Central and South America are full of bulbous fruits that aren't being distributed in anyway. These are called "anachronisms" by Dan Janzen and Paul Martin, two scientists who hypothesize that such fruits are missing their Pleistocene partners. Even avocados, prickly pears and papayas used to be gulped down whole, seeds and all, by fridge-sized armadillos called glyptodonts. In southern Nepal, the horned rhinoceros's main source of food is the Trewia nudijlom fruit. The rhino eats it, and then excretes the seeds in marshy lands where they can grow into new plants." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.) "Today, a red traffic light means "stop," which is exactly what we used to do in our primeval forests. The greens and reds are now part of the asphalt jungle, but their meaning hasn't changed much. In the same way, taste theoreticians speculate that humans first evolved a liking for sugary things as a way to distinguish between ripe and unripe fruits. As our knuckle-dragging ancestors straightened into upright postures and banged out some crude tools, fruits were consistently part of prehistoric man's diet." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.) "The devastation of these ancient forests has tragic consequences. Nomadic tribes, like the Penan, who used to survive on wild tree fruits can no longer maintain their traditional lifestyles. As their feeding spots have vanished, Malaysian officials have focused on assimilating them. Abdul Raham Yakub, a former chief minister of Sarawak, has said, "I would rather see them eating McDonald's hamburgers than the unmentionables they eat in thejungle." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.)

"Except for patches of hardwood forests where blackthorn, yew, oak, and ash trees grew, and the occasional vineyard, we saw only rough pastureland. I recalled the many warnings wed seen or heard about Barbagia. "You might think twice about wandering around many of the desolate villages of the interior, especially in Nuoro province," wrote the author of one guidebook. Our friend Franco Diaz from Cagliari, Sardinia's largest city, confirmed our initial impression of Barbagia as a difficult place where people eke out a living from a rugged land by raising sheep and goats." - Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who've Lived the Longest (Get the book.)

"In a world of well-vacuumed homes, scrubbed bathrooms and kitchens, and more time spent in minivans than mucking about through woods, forests, and farmland, coupled with massive vaccination campaigns that prevent full-fledged infection from many childhood diseases, children's immune systems are, in a sense, overprotected. If a child's immune system were a military academy, you might think of invading pathogens (be they bacteria or viruses) as sergeants providing a comprehensive set of military drills." - Donna Jackson Nakazawa, The Autoimmune Epidemic (Get the book.) "Ebola virus outbreaks are linked to mining development in previously untouched areas as well as hunters looking for exotic bush meat; the AIDS pandemic is believed to have originated from human encroachment into African forests where wild chimpanzees were a reservoir for the virus; and fruit bats in remote areas are thought to be the original source of several high profile zoonotic pathogens which have spread to humans, the most recent of which is SARS. Similarly, H5N1 virus, or avian flu, is often the result of farmers and infected fowl crowding together in prime living space." - Donna Jackson Nakazawa, The Autoimmune Epidemic (Get the book.)

"This is without the current doubling in methane produced by all the cows we keep, by the rice paddies that are growing in step with our population, by decomposing swamps, and by the termites that feed on the dead wood in our dying forests. Water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas; as the air becomes warmer and more moist, the heat trapped in the tropical regions will increase even further. Deforestation does not help, either; it reduces the biosphere's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.)

"There will be widespread destruction of coral reefs, the alpine flora of Europe and Australia will disappear, and there will be severe losses of China's broad-leaved forests. Climate change will play havoc with the yield of agricultural lands and thus threaten entire human populations. Although in cold regions with short growing seasons yields could increase, they will decrease in tropical and subtropical areas where crops are already growing near the limit of their heat tolerance. The negative effects outweigh the few positive consequences." - Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World (Get the book.) "The production of oil, fish, lumber, and other major resources has already peaked, half the world's forests and 40 percent of the coral reefs are gone, and annually about 23 million acres of forest are lost. It is not the sheer size of humanity that is the cause of the problem but its per capita resource use—it is out of proportion to its size: 6.4 billion humans are only 0.014 percent of the biomass of life on Earth and 0.44 percent of the biomass of animals." - Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World (Get the book.) "Nature suffers in unforeseen ways: forests fail to regenerate, soils are impoverished, the climate changes, freshwater tables are lowered, ocean levels rise, and the atmosphere becomes polluted. Ultimately the Macroshift builds toward a point of bifurcation, the critical third phase at which society's evolutionary path is rapidly decided. As in nature, bifurcations in society are triggered by instabilities that are beyond the ability of the system to overcome: this is the true meaning of "unsustainability." - Ervin Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World (Get the book.)

"Additionally, the region is characterized by a rapid transition between the humid mountain forests of the Andes and the dry, deciduous forests and deserts of the Peruvian lowlands. Considerable progress has been made in the overall taxonomic treatment of the flora of the country as a whole l1-2-34!. However, the southern part of the country is relatively unexplored. The first floristic studies were conducted in the 1940s(5f>1, followed by decades without any further research activity. Until the late 1990s little work had been done on vegetation structure, ecology, and ethnobotany." - Rainer W. Bussmann and Douglas Sharon, Plants of Longevity, The Medicinal Flora of Vilcabamba (Get the book.)

"The fields and forests are crowded with plants containing higher levels of various phytochemicals than their domesticated cousins. Why? Because these plants have to defend themselves against pests and disease without any help from us, and because historically we've tended to select and breed crop plants for sweetness; many of the defensive compounds plants produce are bitter. Wild greens also tend to have higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids than their domesticated cousins, which have been selected to hold up longer after picking." - Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.)

"Chinese] are famous for the woolen substance obtained from their forests; after a soaking in watet rhey comb off the white down of the leaves."15 Despite, or perhaps because of, the mystety of its otigin, by the time Constantinople was the imperial capital, silk was the most important trade good crossing the empire's borders. As such, payment for it represented a huge outflow of gold, though one perverse oddity of the silk trade is that its entry into the empire was sometimes paid for by . . . silk." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.) "Only western Europe possessed the topographic advantage of a potentially arable frontier, in the form of the great European forests. Truly, the shock of the plague remade not only the political but the environmental map of Europe.3' The great plague-caused population decline experienced in the lands notth of the Alps was succeeded by a centuties-long population boom. The inevitable result was that power flowed north from the Mediterranean, since the greatest population increase occurred among a people that paid spiritual homage to Rome, but owned fealty to a?usually—Frankish king." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.) "The Great Pyramid offers a distinctly poor ratio of usable interior space to exterior surface, and even the spectacular exteriors of buildings like the Parthenon and the Temple of Karnak surround interiors that are largely forests of columns holding up stone roofs. This sort of architecture was quite satisfactory for rhe Egyprians, and with some exceptions, to the Greeks. It was left to Rome to perfect the dome. The debate about the inspirarion for Anthemius and Isidore's dome is now more than fifteen centuries old." - William Rosen, Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (Get the book.)

"However, while the Amazon rainforests have received a great deal of scientific attention, the mountain forests and remote highland areas are still relatively unexplored. The first floristic studies were conducted in the 1920's [28], followed by decades without any further research activity. Until the late 1990s little work had been done on vegetation structure, ecology, and ethnobotany in the mountain forests and PLANTS of the FOUR WINDS Issues in Ethnobotany Moran, King and Carlson [83] trace the emergence of biodiversity prospecting." - Rainer W. Bussmann and Douglas Sharon, Plants of the four winds - The magic and medicinal flora of Peru (Get the book.)

"In the United States alone, more than 18,000 products are licensed for use, and each year more than 2 billion pounds of pesticides are applied to crops, homes, schools, parks, and forests. Such widespread use results in pervasive human exposure. If you were born before 1974, you may have been exposed to dieldrin, a pesticide that was found in 96 percent of all meat and 85 percent of all dairy products tested in the United States. If you were born before 2004, you may have been exposed to diazinon, a toxin poisonous to the nervous system and sprayed on lawns and in gardens before its ban." - Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith, The Detox Strategy: Vibrant Health in 5 Easy Steps (Get the book.)

"Then spake Tane-mahuta, the father of the forests and of all things that inhabit them, or that are constructed from trees, 'Nay, not so. It is better to rend them apart, and to let the heaven stand far above us, and the earth lie under our feet. Let the sky become a stranger to us, but the earth remain close to us as our nursing mother.'"' Several of the brother gods vainly tried to rend apart the heavens and the earth. At last it was Tane-mahuta himself, the father structed from trees, who succeeded in the titanic project. " - Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell (Get the book.) "When the woman reached the animal's stomach, "she saw large forests and great rivers, and many high lands; on one side there were many rocks; and there were many people who had built their village there; and many dogs and many cattle; all was there inside the elephant." 58 The Irish hero, Finn MacCool, was swallowed by a monster of indefinite form, of the type known to the Celtic world as a peist. The little German girl, Red Ridinghood, was swallowed by a wolf. The Polynesian favorite, Maui, was swallowed by his great-great-grandmother, Hine-nui-te-po." - Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell (Get the book.)

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