" ,,, we might say, borrowing Keats's tender and compassionate line,"Many are poets that do not think it",that many are ecologists who do not think it and do not recognize it now. Nore are these two statements, one poetic and the other ecological, unrelated, for both have been true of man as a "thinking reed" in search of true metaphor through the millennia. Farmer or fisherman, hunter or natural scientist, poet or explorer, all have to read nature's behaviour ecologically, at different levels of organization and from a poetic viewpoint,in order to achieve a linguistic transformation of perception, an expression of mind's metaphorical relations with nature. That ecology requires a combination of aethetic perception and disciplined thinking- a characteristic of true poetry as well-"

“　The recognition of the value of true metaphor would seem to be the key to the journey, leading as it does to the ultimate meaning of human transcendence and to the understanding of our most precious tool, compassionate intelligence.”