science and technology on Landscape

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered ...

What we call “nature” isn’t the same nature our great-grandparents knew. Even if they lived as far south as Baltimore, they could cut eighteen-inch blocks of ice off ponds in the winter to cool their ...

If you see a thing whole—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life is a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You ne...

Whenever I have encountered any kind of deep problem with civilization anywhere in the world—be it the logging of rain forests, ethnic or religious intolerance or the brutal destruction of a cultural ...

God’s garden, made “in the beginning,” does not lie behind us, but ahead of us, in hope, and, in the meantime, all around us as our place of work. History without gardens would be a wasteland. What th...

The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.

The whole earth is a living icon of the face of God.

[A gardener cultivates soil more than plants.] He lives buried in the ground. He builds his monument in a heap of compost. If he came into the Garden of Eden he would sniff excitedly and say: ‘Good Lo...

When people long for some kind of escape, it’s worth asking: What would “back to the land” mean if we understood the land to be where we are right now? Could “augmented reality” simply mean putting yo...

The Country is both the Philosopher's Garden and his Library, in which he Reads and Contemplates the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God.

In the desert outside of Tucson, scientists dreamed up an experiment to re-create the conditions of earth for space, when and if the earth could not be made great again. The biosphere was a little wor...

There is no escaping the need to manage nature. The best we can do is to observe the following rule: So manage nature as to minimize the need to manage nature. . . . We are destined to work our way ac...

The custody of the garden was given in charge to Adam, to show that we possess the things which God has committed to our hands, on the condition that, being content with the frugal and moderate use of...

There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.

The thing to do with nature ... is to listen to it, and watch it, and look deep into its eyes in a sense, as though you were listening to and watching a friend, not just hearing the words or even just...

O God, whose reason rules the world, who formed the starry heights above, timeless, time’s chain far forth you hurled, unmoved, gave all things power to move. Prevailed on by no outside cause to fashi...

We say that Nature rests, yet she is working like mad. She has only shut up shop and pulled the shutters down; but behind them she is unpacking new goods, and the shelves are becoming so full that the...

A wrong attitude toward nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude toward God.

Jan Boersema has argued that even one of the icons of environmental catastrophe, the “collapse” of civilization on Easter Island, was probably not nearly so abrupt or catastrophic as many assume. It i...

Gracious God, for the goodness and beauty of creation we thank you. For the way your creation nurtures and inspires us, we are grateful. Yet, the more we pay attention to the world, the more we see i...

The first phrase, “be fruitful and multiply,” means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, “subdue the earth,” means to harness t...

In the world of ecology, the tallest trees in a forest form a canopy that is called the overstory. It provides shade for the understory—all the vegetation that grows beneath the uppermost layer of fol...

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in. Quoted in John Hudson Tiner, Exploring the World of Biology: From Mus...

All these technologies have carried the promise of a boundless world. They would free us from geography, allowing us to move out of crowded cities and into lives of our own bucolic choosing. Forget th...

O heavenly Father, who has filled the world with beauty: Open our eyes to your gracious hand in all your works; so that, rejoicing in your whole creation, we may learn to serve you with gladness; for ...

The physical world is the doorway to the spiritual world.

Let him who possesses a field, so partake of its yearly fruits, that he may not suffer the ground to be injured by his negligence; but let him endeavor to hand it down to posterity as he received it, ...

I am abashed, solitary, helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me. But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pur...

The world is an example of the workings of God, because while we observe the work, the Worker is brought before us.

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty...