Autumn clouds, vague and obscure; The evening, lonely and chill. I felt the dampness on my garments, But saw no spot, and heard no sound of rain.

I want us to know our world. If I lived in North Georgia on up through the Appalachians, I would be just as crazy about the mountain laurel as I am about [Texas] bluebonnets.

We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.

Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it.

I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn. But where The wind is westerly, Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly Into the apparitions of the sky, They purpose nothing but their ease and die Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea.

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.