As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, we've become so removed from reality that we're starting to prefer artificiality.

...avacados, prickly pears and papayas used to be gulped down whole, seeds and all, by fridge-sized armadillos called glyptodonts.

To experience biophilia is to love a diversity that, as limitless as it is fragile, both haunts us and fills us with hope.

The playwright Edward Albee has characterized [the suddenness of the appearance of fruits and flowers in evolutionary history] as 'that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.

It turned out to be just his sort of life in Melbourne [Florida] -- a little three-room mini apartment to himself, and down on the strip, five different bars where you had women going around in bathing suits. In the backyard, his mother's new husband had grown a miraculous tree, a lemon trunk grafted with orange, tangerine, satsuma, kumquat, and grapefruit limbs, each bearing its own vivid fruit. Every morning, Jeff would go out and fill his arms, and squeeze himself a pitcher of juice, thick and sun-hot. That house was good for his mother, too. The swimming pool trimmed fifteen pounds off of her. She didn't seem to have moods anymore, and she didn't fly off the handle when Jeff beat her in the cribbage games they played most afternoons.

We respect Band Aid's ability to raise so much money for relief efforts, but their lyrics seem so misguided and inappropriate. Africa isn't a land 'where nothing ever grows' and 'no rain nor river flows.' And how are lines such as, 'Well, tonight, thank God it's them instead of you' supposed to be helpful?