White Innovations

It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favoured in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both; in which the landscape has been moulded by numerous generations of one race, and in which the landscape in turn has modified the race to its own character.

The “experience of nature,” as it is understood by modern man, namely, as a lyrical, subjectivist pathos awoken in the sentiments of the individual at the sight of nature, was almost entirely absent in traditional men. Before the high and snowy peaks, the silence of the woods, the flowing of the rivers, mysterious caves, and so on, traditional man did not have poetic and subjective impressions typical of a romantic soul, but rather real sensations — of the supernatural, of the powers (numina) that permeated those places;

• social justice sally: everything my grandparents believed about the world was MORALLY WRONG
• nature: oh sweetie

The facts of nature cannot in the long run be violated. Penetrating and seeping through everything like water, they will undermine any system that fails to take them into account.

Whatever we choose, the laws of nature will not change. Eventually, our perverse decision to reverse the course of evolution will again be reversed. A society that forces the competent to support a growing army of incompetents will some day come crashing down, and in the ensuing chaos it will be the fit who once again survive. “Drive out nature with a pitchfork,” wrote the Roman satirist Juvenal, “and it will nevertheless return.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

The forest is not merely an expression or representation of sacredness, nor a place to invoke the sacred; the forest is sacredness itself. Nature is not merely created by God, nature is God. Whoever moves within the forest can partake directly of sacredness, experience sacredness with his entire body, breath sacredness and contain it within himself, drink the sacred water as a living communion, bury his feet in sacredness, open his eyes and witness the burning beauty of sacredness.