Throughout the life sciences, “culture” is a flowering, while degradation is a rotting. Why are we using the one word where the other should be? Culture is the means by which we evolve in a general forward sense within a generation. Degradation is the failure to survive by the unfit. Civilization advances by evolution, and thereby, in part, by culture. Degradation spins out the downward arc of extinction.
— Kilgore Forelle