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PLANT AND INSECT RIGHTS

Francis Of Assisi wore bells on his toes to warn the insects he was coming.

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George Bernard Shaw: I love little children too but I don't cut off their heads and stick them in vases

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Pablo Neruda: You can cut all the flowers but you can't keep spring from coming

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Sai Baba: Why pluck a flower and hasten her death.

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The Spanish poet Lorca, assassinated by Franco: "They cut timber .....as easily as if they were baking bread."
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Sterling North: We are but the ephemera of the moment, the brief custodians of redwoods which were ancient when Christ was
born.
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Rabindranath Tagore: By plucking her petals, you do not gather the beauty of the flower.
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Wm Shakespeare: Witness this primrose bank whereon I lie; These forceless flowers
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Alice Herrington, deceased president of Friends of Animals: re her unmowed acreage: 'the bunnies like it'.
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Ted Steinberg, Cleveland environmental historian and author of American Green: (re the American obsession with a crewcut layer
of monotypic chipped blue grass) Long Island or Lawn Guyland as it is sometimes called.
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President Theodore Roosevelt of the US (who established
the national park system which included the Grand Canyon,
Yellowstone, Yosemite etc.) at age 9: I am sorry the trees have
been cut down.
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Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey: I have a wild section of my garden which is my favourite part. I don't go there, I don't weed it, I don't do anything there, I leave it alone. It is full of insects and birds, and I have already a green lizard, a wall lizard and a gecko there
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Brother James Marcus: All that exists for a reason,
including the dandelion in your yard you'd like to exterminate

Brother James Marcus: Dandelions.. they must be God's
favorite flower for He plants them everywhere.
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Mike Dixon, mayor of Blackey Kentucky, who stopped mowing his lawn:
"I don't want to fight nature anymore. Flowers began popping up in my yard. Birds and squirrels also moved in. I don't know why we cut grass, but I do know that I like to sit here in the evenings and enjoy what we have in eastern Kentucky.
I don't like to hear the buzzing sound of lawn mowers and weed cutters."
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Edward G Bulwer-Lytton:
"Love thou the rose, yet leave it on its stem."
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Stephen King in The Lawn Mower Man:
"The neighbor's dog chased the cat under the mower...
they cleaned off the blades. Harold decied to get rid of the mower."

"the mower spat out the mole..
in a series of entrails"

"The lawnmower was tearing through the unfortunate grass like an
avenging devil from hell."
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William Bernhardt: (paraphrased): Our forests are no
longer chestnuts 200 ft from branch to branch tip,
200 ft tall white pine, ... our forests are full of stick trees.

Walt Whitman:
We are the journeywork of the stars, no less than the leaves of grass."
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Seth Godin:
The reason for a lawn? To demonstrate wastefulness. A lawn tells your neighbors you can afford to waste land, waste water and have a team of servants to keep it all pretty.. 17 billion
a year business
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Sai Baba: Ramakrishna was so sensitive he would not walk on grass
   (paraphrased)

Frank Hyman:
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"Aside from the costs, some folks have more of an aesthetic opposition to lawns. They consider them boring."
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"I come here not to bury the American lawn, but to shrink it."

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Cyberspace Anon:
Now let me get this straight. They fertilize grass so it will grow. And when it does grow, they cut it off and pay to throw it away?
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Speak to me of Love, said St Francis to the almond tree,
and the almond tree blossomed.
-Nikos Kazantzakis-
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Catullus:
"As a flower springs up secretly in a fenced garden,
unknown to the cattle, torn up by no plough,

Vt flos in saeptis secretus nascitur hortis,
ignotus pecori, nullo conuolsus aratro,
http://www.vroma.org/~hwalker/VRomaCatullus/062.html

Edna St Vincent Millay:
God, I can push the grass apart and lay my finger on Thy heart.

Haiku poet Nancy Wiley:
My canoe skirts them
Aunt Deede's water lilies
. . . she watches

Author Peggy Mason:
What can one think of a child of seven, who weeps at the sight of trees being cut down because God is being hurt? I felt that God must be in the tiniest flower, the smallest insect, in the stones under one's feet, as well as in the vastness of the starry heavens.
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Isaiah: Break not the bruised reed.
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Lawrence Block: The high azalea and rhododendron bushes
look lush, untamed,.... nice. (Rhododendron can grow
90 feet tall in Nepal)... The plants (have) a desire to
grow tall. Anyone who would cut down a New Orleans
live oak should be (punished).
And as at dawn across the level mead
On wings impetuous some wind will come,
And with its too harsh kisses break the reed
Which was its only instrument of song, -Oscar Wilde-
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Revelation's Fifth Angel: Harm no green living being
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Buddha: May all that have life be delivered from suffering.
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Bhagavad Gita: Of trees I am the fig.
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Mahavira of the Jains: Kill not. Cause no pain.
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Jesus: Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not nor do they
spin. Yet Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed as one of these.
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Joel 1: The land mourns the destruction of plants.
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Jeremiah 10: 3 For the customs of the people are vanity. For one
cuts a tree out of the forest. They deck it with silver and gold.
They fasten it with nails that it not move.
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Sai Baba: Why pluck a flower and hasten her death?
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Prince Charles:
."I just come and talk to the plants, really..very important to talk to them, they respond I find."

I can only say that for some reason I felt in my bones that if you abuse nature unnecessarily and fail to maintain a balance, then she will probably abuse you in return.
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Genesis 1:29 Behold I have given you herb yielding seed. To
you it shall be for food.
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George Bernard Shaw: I love little children too but I don't
cut off their heads and stick them in vases.
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Laurie King: rows of brutally pruned rose bushes
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T Earley: My carbon footprint has been lessened by not
mowing my meadows.
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Oscar Wilde:
The fact is I picked a primrose in the wood yesterday
and she became so ill, I sat up with her all night.

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Isaiah: Turn your weapons into plowshares (no till advocates
say plowshares too like mowers are violent.)
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Washington Post editorial March 19, 1977:
"The tall grass can only benefit the citizens who seek the beauty of Rock Creek Park".
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JBO: This is the first year in 30 that I did not kill a Christmas
tree for Christ.*

(the writer did not mean to imply that Jesus wanted sentient
trees sacrificed)

Saxon:
He talked to the plants to lull them into a false sense of security.
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Robert Frost has several poems
on not mowing:

THE TUFT OF FLOWERS

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been -- alone,
'As all must be,' I said within my heart,
'Whether they work together or apart.'
But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,
Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night
Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.
And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own,
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
'Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
'Whether they work together or apart.'

(The Tuft Of Flowers was included in a 1929
collection of the world's most famous poems)

WEST-RUNNING BROOK
'Fred, where is north?'
'North? North is there, my love.
The brook runs west.'
'West-running Brook then call it.'
(West-Running Brook men call it to this day.)
'What does it think k's doing running west
When all the other country brooks flow east
To reach the ocean? It must be the brook
Can trust itself to go by contraries
The way I can with you -- and you with me --
Because we're -- we're -- I don't know what we are.
What are we?'
'Young or new?'
'We must be something.
We've said we two. Let's change that to we three.
As you and I are married to each other,
We'll both be married to the brook. We'll build
Our bridge across it, and the bridge shall be
Our arm thrown over it asleep beside it.
Look, look, it's waving to us with a wave
To let us know it hears me.'
' 'Why, my dear,
That wave's been standing off this jut of shore --'
(The black stream, catching a sunken rock,
Flung backward on itself in one white wave,
And the white water rode the black forever,
Not gaining but not losing, like a bird
White feathers from the struggle of whose breast
Flecked the dark stream and flecked the darker pool
Below the point, and were at last driven wrinkled
In a white scarf against the far shore alders.)
'That wave's been standing off this jut of shore
Ever since rivers, I was going to say,'
Were made in heaven. It wasn't waved to us.'
'It wasn't, yet it was. If not to you
It was to me -- in an annunciation.'
'Oh, if you take it off to lady-land,
As't were the country of the Amazons
We men must see you to the confines of
And leave you there, ourselves forbid to enter,-
It is your brook! I have no more to say.'
'Yes, you have, too. Go on. You thought of something.'
'Speaking of contraries, see how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.
Here we, in our impatience of the steps,
Get back to the beginning of beginnings,
The stream of everything that runs away.
Some say existence like a Pirouot
And Pirouette, forever in one place,
Stands still and dances, but it runs away,
It seriously, sadly, runs away
To fill the abyss' void with emptiness.
It flows beside us in this water brook,
But it flows over us. It flows between us
To separate us for a panic moment.
It flows between us, over us, and with us.
And it is time, strength, tone, light, life and love-
And even substance lapsing unsubstantial;
The universal cataract of death
That spends to nothingness -- and unresisted,
Save by some strange resistance in itself,
Not just a swerving, but a throwing back,
As if regret were in it and were sacred.
It has this throwing backward on itself
So that the fall of most of it is always
Raising a little, sending up a little.
Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us.'
'To-day will be the day....You said so.'
'No, to-day will be the day
You said the brook was called West-running Brook.'
'To-day will be the day of what we both said.')

John Grisham: The bush hog is a violent machine
(paraphrased)
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