Man and the Natural World Quotes in Red Mars

It always seemed to him that sunset more than any other time of day made it clear that they stood on an alien planet; something in the slant and redness of the light was fundamentally wrong, upsetting expectations wired into the savannah brain over millions of years. (1.2.67)

The crew's senses would never perceive the subatomic wind approaching them, and yet it was one of the worst things that could have happened. And everyone knew it. (2.3.42)

"No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days!" (2.4.134)

[…] they were no longer exploring untouched land, and the nature of the landscape itself was altered, split left and right by the parallel lines of crosshatched wheel tracks, and by the green canisters slightly dimmed by a rime of dust, all marking "the way." It wasn't wilderness anymore; that was the point of road-building, after all. (3.5.135)

"I think you value consciousness too high, and rock too little. We are not the lords of the universe. We're one small part of it. We may be its consciousness, but being the consciousness of the universe does not mean turning it all into a mirror image of us. It means rather fitting into it as it is, and worshiping it with our attention." (3.6.125)

So life adapts to conditions. And at the same time, conditions are changed by life. That is one of the definitions of life: organism and environment change together in a reciprocal arrangement, as they are two manifestations of an ecology, two parts of a whole. (4.1.6)

It was a kind of a landscape religion, a consciousness of Mars as a physical space suffused with kami, which was the spiritual energy or power that rested in the land itself. (4.2.85)

[The dust] had already halved the land visible since John first saw it, and now it approached like a giant breaking wave, a billowy chocolate milk wave 10,000 meters high, with a bronze filigree foaming up and off it, leaving great curved streamers in the pink sky above. "Wow!" John cried. "Here it comes! Here it comes!" (5.7.32)

No one would say population control, of course, it was a forbidden phrase in politics, but that's what it was in fact, and it was turning into the tragedy of the commons all over again: if one country ignored the U.N. resolutions, then nearby countries were howling for fear of being overwhelmed. (6.4.9)

The tents nearest the piste had very few trees in them, and looked like commercial districts. Frank caught quick glimpses of food stands, video rentals, open front gyms, clothing stores, Laundromats. Litter piled in the streets. (6.4.63)