This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we require not only clean air and a steady climate, but also an abundance of meadows and woodlands, rivers and oceans, teeming with life and the mass existence of other living creatures.

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.

The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about native fauna, other than the handful of birds I saw on trips to the beach or Sunday walks.

John Burnside Quotes