Placing many quotes I have made over the years in no way allows me to be compared to those who surround me for I am not one-tenth the persons they are. Read them digest them and reflect on them for the future.
The greatest acknowledgment I have ever received was this from a friend with his quote: “Your name will be andi. Pronounced Undi, where An means to care for and Di is the earth. The Yizi in Western China will adopt this name for you, as you are our brother and a career of the earth. The soil is one of our three greatest gifts bestowed upon the Earth for all men to share. The other two are water and air.” – Zhang Wen Guan.
“Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the “environmentalist view,” as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the “real world view.” – Edward O. Wilson.
“Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.” — Theophrastus Father of Botany
“Time is the most valuable gift you can give a friend.” — Theophrastus Father of Botany.
“The difference between man and animals is that man differs from the latter in the fact that he alone has the power of understanding and reason.” But does he? — Theophrastus Father of Botany
“Life is ruled by fortune, not wisdom.” — Theophrastus Father of Botany
“That the underlying nature is one and infinite … but not undefined as Anaximander said but definite, for he identifies it as air; and it differs in its substantial nature by rarity and density. Being made finer it becomes fire; being made thicker it becomes wind, then cloud, then (when thickened still more) water, then earth, then stones; and the rest come into being from these.” — Theophrastus Father of Botany
“Nature’s economy shall be the base for our own, for it is immutable, but ours is secondary. An economist without knowledge of nature is therefore like a physicist without knowledge of mathematics.” — Carl Linnaeus
“Nature does not proceed by leaps and bounds” — Carl Linnaeus
“The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race.” – Edward Gough Whitlam
“A herbarium is better than any illustration; every botanist should have one.” — Carl Linnaeus
“Hence every traveller should be a botanist, for in all views plants form the chief embellishment” – Charles Darwin
“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science; for they often long endure,” – Charles Darwin.
“Botany is the only science that people will derive pleasure from, yearn for, indulge them selves with, touch, and find absolute beauty and relief in, day after day after day without the need for books.” – andi Mellis
“Don’t be like me, as I do not have tolerance for people who do not have tolerance for other people.” – andi Mellis
“All democracies have problems with Freedom of speech and who should have that freedom to speak.” – andi Mellis
“The Earth is what we all have in common.” – Wendell Berry
“He that plants trees loves others besides himself.” – Thomas Fuller
“We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.” ― Wendell Berry,
“I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use.” – Mother Teresa
“Botany: We can live without every other science but we cannot live without plants. They are our food, our lungs, our strengths, our relaxation, our pleasure, our future and our hope. Our moment of wisdom is when we are able to recognize this fact.” andi Mellis.
“We rich nations, for that is what we are, have an obligation not only to the poor nations, but to all the grandchildren of the world, rich and poor. We have not inherited this earth from our parents to do with it what we will. We have borrowed it from our children and we must be careful to use it in their interests as well as our own. Anyone who fails to recognize the basic validity of the proposition put in different ways by increasing numbers of writers, from Malthus to The Club of Rome, is either ignorant, a fool, or evil.”
Moss Cass
“A friend of mine looks at the forest while another looks at the individual tree. They are both amateur botanists. Which one are you?” – andi Mellis
“One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.” – Leo Tolstoy
“The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share.” – Lady Bird Johnson
“The Earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations.” – John Paul II
”The more I learn, the more I understand and know the more I realize I do not understand and do not know.” – andi Mellis
“Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.” – Jimmy Carter
“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of a difference you want to make.” – Jane Goodall
“The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.” – Gaylord Nelson
“If you can avoid what makes you sad you will always be happy and
if you make every problem an experience, you will never have a problem, but a life full of experiences” andi Mellis.
“Botany is the eldest daughter of Medicine” – Johann Herman Bass
“Remember without grasses and rushes there is no bull, no cow, no ram and no you.” – andi Mellis .
“The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.” – Al Gore
“We’ll tell him his mother waits for him in heaven, I suppose.”
“Is that a lie?”
“It’s what we tell fools and children.” She sighed. “Postulating a heaven gives man an out for having been unable to retain the paradise he was given here on earth.” – Sheri S. Tepper
Grasses and rushes are converted to meat, clothes, bio fuel, and
medicine and manure what more do we need? More manure. – andi Mellis .
“All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they would grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.” – Neal Stephenson
“Poverty is a national waste as well as individual waste. We are all diminished when any of us are denied proper education. The nation is the poorer – a poorer economy, a poorer civilization, because of this human and national waste”. – Edward Gough Whitlam
“Plants are the healers, plants are the feeders and plants are the purifiers. They all use the soil, the water and the air. I need nothing more to survive but once one of these die I die too. – andi Mellis
“What’s the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on.” – Henry David Thoreau
“To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.” – Helen Keller
“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The Earth is a fine place and worth fighting for.”
—Ernest Hemingway
“As I walk with Beauty
As I walk, as I walk,
The universe is walking with me,
In beauty it walks before me,
In beauty it walks behind me,
In beauty it walks below me,
In beauty it walks above me,
Beauty is on every side.” – Traditional Navajo
“The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.”
—Barry Commoner
“We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.”
—Barbara Ward
“Election days come and go. But the struggle of the people to create a government which represents all of us and not just the one percent – a government based on the principles of economic, social, racial and environmental justice – that struggle continues.” – Bernie Sanders”
Most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.” – Yvon Chouinard
“Those born without the need for material wealth are the only ones who can think clearly with out prejudice to where the real wealth of life lies.” – andi Mellis
“We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment.” – Margaret Mead
“Sadly, it’s much easier to create a desert than a forest.” – James Lovelock
“I think it is far more important to save one square mile of wilderness, anywhere, by any means, than to produce another book on the subject.” – Edward Abbey
“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. – Henry David Thoreau
I do not give up living because I had a cancer. I begin living because I had the cancer. – andi Mellis
“Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.” – Yvon Chouinard,
Botany is the science of the vegetable kingdom, is one of the most attractive, most useful and most extensive departments of human knowledge. It is above every other science of beauty.” – Sir Joseph Paxton.
“If human beings were to treat one another’s personal property the way they treat the natural environment, we would view that behavior as anti-social and illegal.” – Bartholomew
“If I can teach my students to learn they will learn more than I can teach them, so if they learn more than I can teach them I will learn from them.” – andi Mellis
“Why is it that we judge development on what we have built rather than what we have destroyed?” – andi Mellis
“My Happiness Is Thinking of You” – China Anon
“Personality to man is what perfume is to a flower.” – Anon.
“We burn fossil fuel for profits. We are, in qualitative terms, doing nothing more wrong than burning wood. Our wrong doing is we take the energy and use it thousands of times faster than it is naturally produced and do not understand the quantitative economics of what we do.” – andi Mellis
“I try my best to grow young not old, for now I play children’s games with children, run everywhere, am curious about everything I see in nature and don’t understand any of it fully. And when I retire at 25 I know the best years are still ahead of me.” – andi Mellis
“Life is wasted on the young. We die just when we are beginning to live.” – Theophrastus Father of Botany
“I believe it is better to reject outright the views of the purported populist majority and to reflect and carry out the NEEDS of the real majority?” andi Mellis. As a councilor reflecting a council decision as populist and not beneficial to the majority.
“Flowers grow share beauty, peace and happiness then die, Men grow to murder, steal, cheat and lie then die and we dare call ourselves civilized.” – andi Mellis at a council meeting in disgust of a motion re the Rabi Bay project.
“When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.”
Dian Fossey – Gorillas in the Mist.
“The road to the top is long and arduous but the road back down is short and swift.” – andi Mellis
The environment and economics are very similar in that, how can any farmer, forester or timber getter who is intent on destroying the land expect to profit from the land in the future and how can any entrepreneur or government, whose intention it is to destroy the working conditions of their employees expect to profit from their employees? – andi Mellis
Asked by a Council whether he wanted a solicitor to represent him at a court hearing he replied. “We all know what is needed here is the truth. Lawyers and solicitors are employed to make lies look like the truth and truth look like lies. We do not need them confounding or distorting the facts as they are.” – andi Mellis.
“When we kill off the natural enemies of a pest, we inherit their work.”
- Carl Huffaker, University of California.
“Food is fabricated soil fertility.” – William Albrecht
“When we develop we admire what we have done, but do not reflect on what we have destroyed to develop it.” Andi Mellis
“We look to the glory of the past more than we look for inspiration for the future and complain about the present messes which we created from the past, changing very little to avoid the errors of the past when planning for the future to make the future better for everyone and everything.” – andi Mellis
A good dictatorship is both good and benevolent while a bad dictatorship is very bad. andi Mellis.
“In Gods wilderness lies the hope of the world – The great fresh, unblighted, unredeemed wilderness” John Muir 1898
“Capital punishment’ means those without capital get the punishment.” – Sister Helen Prejean
“Volunteers cost little and give a lot, while committees spend hours on minutes, cost a lot and give very little”. – andi Mellis – submission on Strategy Plan CHRBG.
Be careful not to ever lose a minute of your valuable time, as you will never find it. – andi Mellis
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius
“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” – Leo Buscaglia
Often we need to do things that are seen to be wrong, but if the
means justifies the end then what was seen to be wrong is actually
right. Right? – andi Mellis From a talk about the cause of environmentalists.
My friend, I see faults in China but they are far fewer than we have here in little America. One is, it is not a democratic country. But then would the Chinese have enjoyed the great advancements, in peace, hospitals, education, rising living standards, retire at 60 on their full working pay and the many other benefits for its people it has generated. Would these still be coming if it had our so called democracy or the greed of her past rulers? – andi Mellis
Case studies prove that man’s interference and exploitation since white settlement has degraded our beautiful rivers, air and land which are what the early Europeans found:
From the Journal of John Oxley (1820): 6th May 1817.
The Lachlan River.
If however the country is poor, the river is rich in the most excellent fish, procurable in the utmost abundance. One man in less than an hour caught 18 large fish, one of which was a curiosity from its immense size, and the beauty of its colours. … [It] weighed more than seventy pounds … [and the length from nose to tail was 3 feet and 5 inches]. … Most other fish taken this evening weighed from fifteen to thirty pounds each … .
From the Journal of Charles Sturt (1828-9): January, 1829.
The Darling River.
… as I stood upon its banks at sunset, when not a breath of air existed to break the stillness of its waters below me, and saw their surface kept in constant agitation by the leaping fish, I doubted whether the river could supply itself so abundantly …
From the Journal of Thomas Mitchell (1839): 1st June, 1835. The Darling River at Bourke.
… the water being beautifully transparent, the bottom was visible at great depths, showing large fishes in shoals, floating like birds in mid-air.
From an article by George Bennett (1863)
Yass, Tumut and Murrumbidgee Rivers
I have seen the River cod (sic) very plentiful in the Yass, Tumut and Murrumbidgee rivers … … [T]heir average length is nineteen inches … and they are often captured from two and a half to three feet in length and weighing from twenty to twenty five pounds. … [T]hey have even been reported as attaining the weight of upwards of 120 pounds.
Source: Scott (1860)
The Gwydir River
The accounts of the early Europeans are echoed in more contemporary stories about some of our rivers before dams were constructed. For example, this account of fishing in the Gwydir River in the 1860s reflects the explorer’s accounts of the quality of the water:
… we were lure fishing behind a boat and the river had stopped running around here, and you could actually see the fish behind, like thirty metres behind the boat, come up and follow you down the river then go back to their log. … You could see down about ten or twelve foot. Yeah, it was actually crystal clear.
<<Botanical Quotes 1.2>>
For the full account of the destruction read the various accounts from explorers and agriculturalists of the time at
https://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/634004/oral-history-gwydir-river.pdf
“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.” – Marie Curie
“Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.” – Alan Turing.
If a tree dies Plant another in its place. Carl Linneus.
“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.” – Niels Bohr
“Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.” – Galileo Galilei
“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.” – Albert Einstein.
“To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.” – Isaac Newton
A benevolent dictator is better than a benevolent democracy as there can never be a benevolent democracy because human greed, self-indulgence with insatiable power by a majority will always dominate the benevolent minority. – andi Mellis
Sustainability isn’t hard, it’s just not simple. – Marc Alt.
“… governments like ours (QAustralia under Abbott and Morrison.) are willing to sacrifice our planetary life support system to keep the fossil fuel industry alive. – Australia’s United Nations Intergovernmental Panel member on Climate Change, Dr. Joelle Gergis.
We worship/warship heroes and heroines of war, build monuments to them, have special days to honour their efforts in fighting unjust murderous campaigns in the name of freedom so a few can accumulate millions in wealth. WARS against humanity from all sides, rapes and child molestations must cease. The efforts and funding must be diverted away from war to urgently, compelling seemingly insurmountable problems experienced by every niche of the environment and society including our own selfish, self-important little niches.
However, when it comes to the environment fallen comrades are blasphemed, have their names desecrated and their families thrown into poverty.
Chico Mendes (1944-1988) gave all his time and life to the environment before he was brutally murdered for showing his love and efforts. In endeavouring to save the rainforests of Brazil, he surrendered the ultimate price – his life.
Another true hero of the environment Dian Fossey also paid the ultimate price when she too was brutally and senselessly murdered along with her Gorillas. To all the Chico Mendes and Dian Fossey out there – “Lest we forget” – andi Mellis
“I do not for a moment believe that we should set limits on what we can achieve together for our country, for our people, for our future (and add to our environment)” – Edward Gough Whitlam.
Further Comments from Readers:
“Hi reader, it seems you use The Bible of Botany a lot. That’s great as we have great pleasure in bringing it to you! It’s a little awkward for us to ask, but our first aim is to purchase land approximately 1,600 hectares to link several parcels of N.P. into one at The Pinnacles NSW Australia, but we need your help. We’re not salespeople. We’re amateur botanists who have dedicated over 30 years to saving the environment in a practical way. We depend on donations to reach our goal. If you donate just $5, the price of your coffee this Sunday, We can help to keep the planet alive in a real way and continue to bring you regular updates and features on Australian plants all in one Botanical Bible. Any support is greatly appreciated. Thank you.”
In the spirit of reconciliation we acknowledge the Bundjalung, Gumbaynggirr and Yaegl and all aboriginal nations throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their Elders past, present and future for the pleasures we have gained.