Who's your natural world hero?

[loripo]

Also Rachel Carson but for her books about the sea,
Under the Sea Wind
The Edge of the Sea
The Sea Around us...
I learned about the littoral and the pelargic and all the creatures to be found there. Wonderful.

[Pete84]

i used to like jaques cousteau when i was young , i also used to love an audio book i had that told the story of scott of the antartic. plus an inspirational geography teacher called mr hardy.

in my humble opinion learning about the natural world is the most worthwhile of pastimes.

good thread

[Tormentil]

Armand & Micheala Denis............................. Oh, and God.

[Hedera]

Edward Wilson, born and bred in my county. He went to the Antarctic with Scott and produced wonderful drawings of all the natural world. There is a book published containing many of these. At my senior school the Houses were named after Gloucestershire men, Parry, Tyndale, Jenner and Wilson. I was proud to be head of Wilson and have always admired his work. There is a statue of him in Cheltenham.

[danthekeeper]

For me it has to be Richard Jefferies he writes in such a provocative,detailed and descriptive way I can't put his books down.
Kenzie thorpe had a huge impact on my life to the point where we named one of our sons after him, his knowledge of the foreshore will never be equaled.

[Chiltern Ben]

The year before I was born, Carl Sagan gave his "pale blue dot" speach (which I'm sure many here will know), based on a picture from Voyager 1 of the Earth from 6 billion kilometres, so it was just a 1 pixel blue dot. You really need the picture with this, but he said changed how I think ....

"Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known".

Carl - a physicist, astronomer, humanist and honorary ecologist, I think he's the main man, who died tragically early.

Ben

[pressld2]

Welcome to WAB Ben! You and I should team up with Loripo to form the Carl Sagan Appreciation Society.

Here is the pale blue dot image from Voyager 1...



Dave P.

[loripo]

You beat me to it

[Pete84]

i like sagan too. how do you guys feel about stephen baxter ?

[JB9302]

Originally Posted by danthekeeper

For me it has to be Richard Jefferies he writes in such a provocative,detailed and descriptive way I can't put his books down.
Kenzie thorpe had a huge impact on my life to the point where we named one of our sons after him, his knowledge of the foreshore will never be equaled.

dan,
Dont know if you read through the thread I started on Kenzie , some interesting comments from people who knew him

Julian