A Collection of Meaningful Quotes about the Earth, Nature, & Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner

If you enjoy these quotes, I highly recommend purchasing some of Stephen Harrod Buhner’s fantastic books.

Keep that in mind our real purpose here is the song and our capacity to sing it in harmony with other life-forms. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

In this process of unlearning, in the process of feeling and hearing the plants again, one comes to realize many things. And of these things, perhaps stronger than the others, one feels the pain of the Earth. It is not possible to escape it. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

The world is not a static backdrop across which humans can move, building their suburbs where they will, the only intelligent actors on the planet. They call it the American dream, as George Carlin once put it, because you have to be asleep to believe it. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

Art—real art—connects artists, and their art, and those who experience their art, to the metaphysical background of the world, to the imaginal world that lies deep within the physical. That is, in part, its ecological function. And that is why the continuing assaults on the imaginal (and its explorers) are so pervasive, why the schooling of artists—of writers, musicians, painters, sculptors—has become so mechanical, so oriented toward surfaces, toward form. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

For if we should recapture the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses, go below the surface of sensory inputs to what is held inside them, touch again the “metaphysical background” that expresses them, we would begin to experience, once more, the world as it really is: alive, aware, interactive, communicative, filled with soul, and very, very intelligent—and we, only one tiny part of that vast scenario. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner
As James Hillman so eloquently put it, “It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.” A living, aware, and soul-filled world does not respond well to autopsy. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

Plants show just the same sorts of complex and sophisticated behaviors that humans do, from language, to sentience, to intelligence, to the creation of cities, to cooperation in groups, to complex adaptation to their environment, to protection of offspring, to species memory that is handed down through the generations. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

Plant intelligence, microbial memory and culture, viral swarm behavior and horizontal gene transfer, the capacity of animals (and slime mold) for mathematical computation are only tiny bits of the “vast majority” that remains unknown to most people, including nearly all scientists. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

Plants are as sophisticated in behavior as animals but their potential has been masked because it operates on time scales many orders of magnitude longer than that operation in animals. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner
Plants become wise, too, as they age. We are not the only ones capable of it. You can literally feel the difference such maturity brings in encountering old growth trees—the young just don’t have it. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

The killing of mature members of any species leads to a reduction not only in biomass and species density and diversity but also in that species’ accumulated knowledge of how to most efficiently fill its ecological niche and interact with the rest of the ecosystem around it. The accumulated wisdom of the species is severely reduced or, sometimes, even lost in the process. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

Invasive plants—Earth’s way of insisting we notice her medicines. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

Evolution—that is, Gaian innovation—has no end, and it never will. We are just passing actors on the stage, not the ultimate point of the process. ― Stephen Harrod Buhner

If we were to grasp the true nature of nature—if we could comprehend the real meaning of evolution—then we would envision a world in which every living plant, insect, and animal species is changing at every instant, in response to every other living plant, insect, and animal. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

Whole populations of organisms are rising and falling, shifting and changing. This restless and perpetual change, as inexorable and unstoppable as the waves and tides, implies a world in which all human actions necessarily have uncertain effects. The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything we do. ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

James Lovelock, too, noted that “Gaia is an emergent phenomenon, comprehensible intuitively, but difficult or impossible to analyze by reduction.” ―Stephen Harrod Buhner

I hope you enjoyed these meaningful quotes about the Earth, nature, and plants. If you’re interested in reading more by Stephen Harrod Buhner, I highly recommend purchasing some of his insightful books.