How beautiful the sprout-land seen from the cliff! No more cheerful and inspiring sight than a young wood springing up thus over a large tract, when you look down on it, the light green of the maples shaded off into the darker oaks; and here and there a maple blushes bright red. . . . Surely this earth is fit to be inhabited, and many enterprises may be undertaken with hope where so many young plants are pushing up. In the spring, I burned over a hundred acres till the earth was sere and black, and by midsummer this space was clad in a fresher and more luxuriant green than the surrounding even. Shall man then despair? Is he not a sprout-land too after never so many searings and witherings?

—Henry David Thoreau, Journal, II, 488–89

[The] lack of interest in the humble everyday mainsprings of one’s own existence is mandarinism. We know mandarin attitudes have been a sure sign of decay in past civilizations; it probably is a sign in our own culture.

—Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man and Life