Nutrient atoms move downhill by rain and uphill through animal bodies.

Evidence

Between each of his excursions through the biota, X lay in the soil and was carried by the rains, inch by inch, downhill. Living plants retarded the wash by impounding atoms; dead plants by locking them to their decayed tissues. Animals ate the plants and carried them briefly uphill or downhill, depending on whether they died or defecated higher or lower than they fed. No animal was aware that the altitude of his death was more important than his manner of dying. Thus a fox caught a gopher in a meadow, carrying X uphill to his bed on the brow of a ledge, where an eagle laid him low. The dying fox sensed the end of his chapter in foxdom, but not the new beginning in the odyssey of an atom. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 372

Categorization

• CANDY: The deadpan line ‘the altitude of his death was more important than his manner of dying’ is a memorable, shareable aphorism about ecology.
• XREF: connects to: Prairie fires deplete nitrogen that legumes then replenish from the air. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 371