the rain forest

Excerpt from the book Peter Matthiessen's Reader:

The rain forest communities are the oldest on earth, with hundreds of insect species specific to each of the many species of its trees. Almost half of the earth's living things, many as yet undiscovered, live in this green world that is shrinking fast to a small patch on the earth's surface. Man has already destroyed half of the rain forests, which disappear at an ever increasing speed, and a mostly unknown flora and fauna disappear with them. Therefore, at every opportunity, we explore the forest, and often I go out alone, for walking in solitude through the dim glades, immersed in silence, one learns a lot that cannot be learned in any other way.

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Very true. Wonder how many have gone into depression?!

Srik

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accomplishment?

Excerpt from the book Peter Matthiessen's Reader

The finality of extinction is awesome, and not unrelated to the finality of eternity. Man, striving to imagine what might lie beyond the long light years of stars, beyond the universe, beyond the void, feels lost in space; confronted with the death of species, enacted on earth so many times before he came, and certain to continue when his own breed is gone, he is forced to face another void, and feels alone in time. Species appear and, left behind by a changing earth, they disappear forever, and there is a certain solace in the inexorable. But until man, the highest predator, evolved, the process of extinction was a slow one. No species but man, so far as is known, unaided by circumstance or climatic change, has ever extinguished another, and certainly no species has ever devoured itself, an accomplishment of which man appears quite capable!

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Sigh! what a beautiful way of expressing the sadness!

Srik

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