Flower Children

"Man lived in active partnership with plants and animals for whole geological periods before he fabricated machines. His mental involvement with the world of life began with the consciousness of his own existence. Many of his basic qualities he shares with other animals: prolonged sexual pairing and nurturing the young, social companionship and erotic delight, playfulness and joy. His deep love of life was fostered by finding himself in an environment prepared, not merely to maintain life with the requisite amount of physical nourishment, but to promote its unceasing self-transformation. On these matters, even the simplest organisms have something to teach us beyond the range of our most sophisticated technology. If we were dependent for our instructions and our material sustenance upon machines alone, the human race would long ago have died of malnutrition, boredom, and hopeless despair." (pp. 380-381)

"Long before man himself became conscious of beauty and desirous of cultivating it, beauty existed in an endless variety of forms in the flowering plants; and man's own nature was progressively altered, with his increasing sensitiveness to sight and touch and odor, through his further symbolic expression of beautiful form in his ornaments, his cosmetics, his costume, his painted and graven images: all by-products of his enriched social and sexual life. In this sense, we are all 'flower children.'

"For at least twelve thousand years, possibly far longer, man's existence has depended upon the close symbiotic partnership between man and plants, rooted in thousands of small village communities spread over the entire earth. All the higher achievements of civilization have rested on this partnership, one devoted to the constructive improvement of the habitat and the loving and knowing care of plants: their selection, their nurture, their breeding, their enjoyment, in a routine of life that punctuated and heightened the delights of human sexuality." (pp. 381-382)

From Lewis Mumford's the Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power