The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.
Konrad LorenzRead
In nature we find not only that which is expedient, but also everything which is not so inexpedient as to endanger the existence of the species.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the balance of nature, highlighting both beneficial and neutral aspects that preserve species existence.
In this quote, Konrad Lorenz suggests that nature operates in a way that not only facilitates survival through advantageous traits but also maintains various elements that may not be strictly beneficial. These elements are important in ensuring the species' continued existence, indicating that nature's complexity includes both helpful and neutral aspects that contribute to ecological balance.
In practice
In a nature documentary highlighting the balance of ecosystems.
The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.
Whenever we find, in two forms of life that are unrelated to each other, a similarity of form or of behaviour patterns which relates to more than a few minor details, we assume it to be caused by parallel adaptation to the same life-preserving function.
I grew up in the large house and the larger garden of my parents in Altenberg. They were supremely tolerant of my inordinate love for animals.
More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.
Most people have forgotten how to live with living creatures, with living systems and that, in turn, is the reason why man, whenever he comes into contact with nature, threatens to kill the natural system in which and from which he live.
I owe undying gratitude to my patient parents.
We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.
Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch time.
. . . the time has also come to identify and preserve free-flowing stretches of our great rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory.
When the blackberries hang swollen in the woods, in the brambles nobody owns, I spend all day among the high branches, reaching my ripped arms, thinking of nothing, cramming the black honey of summer into my mouth; all day my body accepts what it is. In the dark creeks that run by there is this thick paw of my life darting among the black bells, the leaves; there is this happy tongue.
And still the mad magnificent herald Spring assembles beauty from forgetfulness with the wild trump of April:witchery of sound and odour drives the wingless thing man forth in the bright air.
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.
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