“Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929”

“From age four to five we are all romantics; we are all embryonic royalty, budding ballerinas, or intrepid astronauts; we are all fearless, open, affectionate, and beautiful.”

“It is an eccentric and uniquely human approach to resources: like plowing under your farmland to make way for more lawns, or compromising your air quality in exchange for an enormous car.”

“Successful hunting, it could be said, is an act of terminal empathy: the kill depends on how successfully a hunter inserts himself into the umwelt of his prey--even to the point of disguising himself as that animal and mimicking its behavior.”

“(..)Fate has al­ways been a po­tent force in Rus­sia, where, for gen­er­ations, cit­izens have had lit­tle con­trol over their own des­tinies. Fate can be a bitch, but, as Za­it­sev, Dvornik, and Onofre­cuk had dis­cov­ered, it can al­so be a tiger.”

“There is a saying among the peoples of the Northwest Coast: “The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife,” and Robert Davidson, the man responsible for carving Masset’s first post-missionary pole, imagines this edge as a circle. “If you live on the edge of the circle,” he explained in a documentary film, “that is the present moment. What’s inside is knowledge, experience: the past. What’s outside has yet to be experienced. The knife’s edge is so fine that you can live either in the past or in the future. The real trick,” says Davidson, “is to live on the edge.”

“Fear is not a sin in the taiga, but cow­ardice is [..].”