The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zoology, (those first steps which the farmer, the hunter, and the sailor take,) teach that nature's dice are always loaded; that in her heaps and rubbish are concealed sure and useful results.
Interpretation
Nature holds hidden potential and valuable outcomes, even in unpredictable circumstances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that early endeavors in various fields such as agriculture, astronomy, and zoology reveal a fundamental truth about nature: it can be deceptive and unpredictable, yet within its chaos lies the potential for significant discoveries and benefits. This perspective encourages us to recognize and seek out the valuable lessons and results that emerge from what may initially seem like randomness or disorder.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one might say, 'As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, nature's hidden gifts can be found if we take the time to explore her depths.'
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Wine is sunlight, held together by water.
As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.
Good farmers, who take seriously their duties as stewards of Creation and of their land's inheritors, contribute to the welfare of society in more ways than society usually acknowledges, or even knows. These farmers produce valuable goods, of course; but they also conserve soil, they conserve water, they conserve wildlife, they conserve open space, they conserve scenery.
These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
If we do not act to curb climate change immediately, we will leave our children and grandchildren an unrecognizable planetIt is the poor, those least responsible for climate change and least able to afford adaptation, who would suffer the most.
Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!
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