Ecology

Bush fire recovery.

Now all trees grow fairer and more vigorous in their proper positions; for wild, no less than cultivated trees have their own positions; some love wet and marshy ground, some love exposed sunny positions, some prefer a shady place.— Theophrastus (c. 370 – 287 BCE)

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
— Paul Ehrlich (1932 – 2016).

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
— Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797) (attrib., open to doubt)

No scientific method will ever be able to ask all the right questions about what we do to the environment, let alone find the answers.
— Brian Wynne and Sue Mayer, ‘How science fails the environment’, New Scientist 5 June 1993, 35.

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.
— John Donne (1573 – 1631), Devotions 17.

Oh what a tangled web we weave …
— Sir Walter Scott (1771 – 1832), Marmion

All composite things decay. Strive diligently.
— Buddha (c. 563 – 483 BCE), his last words.

We are wealthy and wasteful but this can’t go on. If we don’t eat dog biscuits, we could end up eating our dog instead.
— Magnus Pyke (1908 – 1992)

In a very real sense we are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet … we shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity.
— Norbert Wiener (1894 – 1964) The Human Use of Human Beings, Avon 1967.

Now I submit that we cannot say much which is sympathetic to our time unless we have assimilated our immediate tradition, which for this country is the conquest of soil and climate. Accordingly, it is a function of Biology in the University to provide this ingredient in education.
— Professor Eric Ashby, The Place of Biology in Australian Education, inaugural lecture, Sydney, 1939.

While all the evidence goes to show that carbonic acid is now an almost invariable constituent of the air, it is one that requires least change in the physical conditions under which the earth exists to effect a change in its proportion. Minute as the proportion is, the delicacy of its relation to animal and vegetable life on the earth makes the maintenance of the apparently unstable equilibrium a matter of serious concern to mankind.
— Scientific American, October 1883, quoted in Scientific American, October 1983, 11

The fen is muddier than the sward.
— Duncan Bain (1944 – ) ‘You make me mud’ in Buns and other low forms of wheat, Infinite Ceres Books, 1989.

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt hath lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?
— Holy Bible, Gospel according to St Matthew, 5:13.

Hypersaline water is not hospitable to life, and the absence of higher life forms long ago gave the Dead Sea its name. (The less judgmental Hebrew name is Yam Hamelach: the Salt Sea.)
— Ilana Steinhorn and Joel Gat, ‘The Dead Sea’, Scientific American, October 1983.

They shut the path through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a path through the woods.
— Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936), The Way through the Woods.

Pinchgut is free from the ‘sad-coloured’ raiment; but Pinchgut decorated with a tower like a gigantic hat — a monstrously magnified drab Mountcastle — doth not add greatly to the harbour’s picturesque.
— Peter Possum (pseud), Peter Possum’s Portfolio. Sydney: J. R. Clarke, 1858.

Strolling on a bright August morning in 1857, along one of the two streets of Wollongong — that beautiful, bustling “Australian Brighton” (the bottom of a well, methinks, would be almost as handsome and lively a watering-place) — I came upon a little edifice of the Florid Haystack order of architecture, evidently fresh from the hands of the bricklayers.
— Peter Possum (pseud), Peter Possum’s Portfolio. Sydney: J. R. Clarke, 1858, 143.

I have already remarked, that I was not prepared for the scene that met my view when I first saw Sydney. The fact was, I had not pictured to myself, nor conceived from any thing I had ever read or heard in England, that so extensive a town could have been reared in that remote region, in so brief a period as that which had elapsed since its foundation. It is not, however, a distant or cursory glance that will give the observer a just idea of the mercantile importance of this busy capital. In order to form an accurate estimate of it, he should proceed from Sydney Cove to Darling Harbour. He would then be satisfied, that it is not upon the first alone that Australian commerce has raised its storehouses and wharfs, but that the whole extent of the eastern shore of the last more capacious basin, is equally crowded with warehouses, stores, dockyards, mills and wharfs, the appearance and solidity of which would do credit even to Liverpool. Where, thirty years ago, the people flocked to the beach to hail an arrival, it is not now unusual to see from thirty to forty vessels riding at anchor at one time, collected there from every quarter of the globe.
— Charles Sturt, Two expeditions into the interior of Southern Australia during the years 1828, 1829, 1830 and 1831. 2 vols: London: Smith Elder and Co., 1833. Facsimile edition published by the Public Library of South Australia, Adelaide, 1963, vol I, pages xviii-xix.

The entrance to Port Jackson is grand in the extreme. The high, dark cliffs we had been coasting along all morning, suddenly terminate in an abrupt precipice, called the South Head, on which stand the lighthouse and the signal-station. The North Head is a similar cliff, a bare bluff promontory of dark horizontal rocks; and between these grand stupendous pillars, as through a colossal gate, we entered Port Jackson.
— Louise Ann (Mrs Charles) Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. London: John Murray, 1844, and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973, 34.

It was with feelings peculiar to the occasion, that I gazed for the first time on the bold cliffs at the entrance of Port Jackson, as our vessel neared them, and speculated on the probable character of the landscape they hid; and I am free to confess, that I did not anticipate any thing equal to the scene which presented itself both to my sight and to my judgement, as we sailed up the noble and extensive basin we had entered, towards the seat of government. A single glance was sufficient to tell me that the hills upon the southern shore of the port, the outlines of which were broken by houses and spires, must once have been covered with the same dense and gloomy wood which abounded every where else. The contrast was indeed very great — the improvement singularly striking. The labour and patience required, and the difficulties which the first settlers encountered in effecting these improvements must have been incalculable. But their success has been complete: it is the very triumph of human skill and industry over Nature herself. The cornfield and the orchard have supplanted the wild grass and the brush; a flourishing town stands over the ruins of the forest; the lowing of the herds has succeeded the wild whoop of the savage; and the stillness of that once desert shore is now broken by the sound of the bugle and the busy hum of commerce.
— Charles Sturt, Two expeditions into the interior of Southern Australia during the years 1828, 1829, 1830 and 1831. 2 vols: London: Smith Elder and Co., 1833. Facsimile edition published by the Public Library of South Australia, Adelaide, 1963, vol I, pages xix-xv.

The whole face of this mountain [Regent Mountain] is clothed with the largest and finest forest trees I have ever seen in the colony. They consist chiefly of the black-butted gum, stringy bark, turpentine, mountain ash, fig, pepperment, box-wood, sassafrass, and red cedar; but the latter is now very scarce, most of it having been already cut down and carried away to Sydney. There are also vast quantities of cabbage, palm, and fern trees growing in the face of the mountain, the former being very beautiful and of great height.
— Lachlan Macquarie, Journal of his Tours in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land 1810-1822. Sydney: Library of Australian History, 1979, 240.

The system of ‘clearing’ here, by the total destruction of every native tree and shrub, gives a most bare, raw, and ugly appearance to a new place. In England we plant groves and woods, and think our country residences unfinished and incomplete without them; but here the exact contrary is the case, and unless a settler can see an expanse of bare, naked, unvaried, shadeless, dry, dusty land spread all around him, he fancies his dwelling ‘wild and uncivilized’.
— Louise Ann (Mrs Charles) Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. London: John Murray, 1844, and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973, 56.

Where land is not required for the plough, the trees are frequently only cut down within a yard of the ground, which remains thickly encumbered with the ugly blackened and burned stumps, giving the appearance at a little distance of a large and closely occupied graveyard; grubbing, or taking up the roots, being a far more expensive operation. Many large trees are destroyed by a ring of bark being taken off the trunk, when they die in the course of a year, and their huge leafless skeletons have an indescribably dreary and desolate aspect.
— Louise Ann (Mrs Charles) Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. London: John Murray, 1844, and Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973, 57.

Only an American would have seen in a single lifetime the growth of the whole tragedy of civilization from the primitive forest clearing.
— George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950), to Hamlin Garland, 1904.

Chicago was not so much thriving upon established commerce as upon the industries which prepared for the arrival of others… . Streetcar lines had been extended far out into the open country in anticipation of rapid growth. The city had laid miles of streets and sewers through regions where, perhaps, one solitary house stood out alone — a pioneer of the populous ways to be.
— Theodore Dreiser (1871 – 1945), Sister Carrie, 1900.

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