Ultimately, Maeterlinck writes with the same intrinsic humility that will be familiar to admirers of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, or Mary Oliver. His conclusions match Thoreau’s: that we humans are only part of a network of much greater systems, and that we occupy a position in those systems which is located at neither the pinnacle nor the center. His is a post-Copernican, Enlightenment project: to rid our perception of the natural world of its human-centric context.

From reviews of new editions of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Intelligence of Flowers and Henry David Thoreau’s Excursions in the Jan 20 Sunday Globe.