Fire and Knowledge

In another book I learn that ten percent of all the world’s species are parasitic insects. It is hard to believe. What if you were an inventor, and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harassing, disfiguring, or totally destroying the other ninety percent? These things are not well enough known.

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), p. 229

I am not convinced that atomic energy, which is currently said to be man’s best hope for a better life, is his best hope at all, or even a good bet. I am not sure energy is his basic problem, although the weight of opinion is against me. I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

–E. B. White, “Coon Tree” (1956) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), p. 39

The egg of a parasite chalcid wasp, a common small wasp, multiplies unassisted, making ever more identical eggs. The female lays a single fertilized egg in the flaccid tissues of its live prey, and that one egg divides and divides. As many as two thousand new parasitic wasps will hatch to feed on the host’s body with identical hunger. Similarly—only more so—Edwin Way Teale reports that a lone aphid, without a partner, breeding “unmolested” for one year, would produce so many living aphids that, although they are only a tenth of an inch long, together they would extend into space twenty-five hundred light-years.

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), p. 167

In the top inch of forest soil, biologists found “an average of 1,35 living creatures present in each square foot, including 865 mites, 265 springtails, 22 millipedes, 19 adult beetles and various numbers of 12 other forms…. Had an estimate also been made of the microscopic population, it might have ranged up to two billion bacteria and many millions of fungi, protozoa, and algae—in a mere teaspoonful of soil.”

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), p. 94

Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects say. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque.

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), p. 65

When the first pilgrims came to America there were an estimated nine billion passenger pigeons—more than twice the number of all birds found in America today.

–Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods (1998), p. 204

In American, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition…

–Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods (1998), p. 200

Fish gotta swim and bird gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), pp. 63