Stability lies in diversity

While modern agriculture has done its best to impose the mentality of monoculture on our knowledge of the natural world, the lesson that keeps re-emerging, both from the failures of science and from the successes of wild nature, is that stability lies in diversity. And diversity, in all of its mystery, is what the grasses can teach us to see.
- Matilda Essig, “Benediction of the Grasses”

Time then and now

Now five years is nothing in a man’s life except when he is very young and very old...
from The Good Earth (1931)
by Pearl S. Buck (26 June 1892 – 6 March 1973)