nature

LORRAINE O’GRADY pauses when I ask about “nature.” She’s genuinely hesitant – unusual for a woman who for three decades has produced art that valiantly defies and disturbs some of the most intimate agreements and unchallenged dictums of contemporary culture. “The division between nature and culture is so extremely codified in the West that it’s unreal,” O’Grady contends. “The real problem is that we have eliminated nature to such a degree that anytime we are reminded of it, we have to suppress the knowledge of it.”...

I am very happy that I can speak at a science convocation because the practice of science, the daily work in the lab, has been the source of so much pleasure and fulfillment in my own life.
Allow me, then, to speak about the common insights that have flown from the advances of science, both recent and traditional. These insights have come from all the diverse disciplines within the sciences, including all the disciplines from which you are graduating today. ...

Five years ago, my wife, son and I left the world of snow blowers and leaf blowers, Skidoos and Seadoos, two-car garages and 100-kilometre commutes, for a simpler, more sustainable life. ...

"I wanted to see the array of trunks that loomed over the creek, the dark side of Adventure, and I kicked off and traveled in that direction, getting closer to the goal in a series of gentle swings. I found myself in the middle of a Gothic tower of fusions, bridges, and spires, held up by flying buttresses. The zone was crisscrossed by branches, and the trunks ran out of sight in both directions, upward and downward. Overhead there was nothing but canopy. No sky, although when I looked down I could see a small patch of ground, starred with ferns.