Quotes About Ecology

As sustainability becomes more and more of a concern, we're going to see more plastics.

My main issue is sustainability of the Earth, and protection of those animals and people who dwell here.

I made my first conservation series for National Geographic in 2000. Ever since I've been finding ways of making my own life as sustainable as it possibly can be.

Civilization can never be sustainable.

The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

Swallows have disappeared, bees are dying out because of pesticides that should have been banned long ago - it's a scandal.

New data suggests contamination in rivers and streams, as well as on land, is increasingly common, with most of the pollution in the form of microscopic pieces of synthetic fibers, largely from clothing.

I used to be such a militant city-ist, but more and more I've seen forests and nature and oceans, and I don't know any more if this is the awesomest way to live.

The general formula of [ecological] management for the future might be, think globally and act locally.

The wild is where you find it, not in some distant world relegated to a nostalgic past or an idealized future; its presence is not black or white, bad or good, corrupted or innocent... We are of that nature, not apart from it. We survive because of it, not instead of it.

Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.

In effect, 1986 marks the year that humans reached Earth's carrying capacity,

It is a sad fact that to many people the loss of a plant species is of less moment than the loss of a football match. I hate the thought that the only record of a beautiful plant might yet be the grave of the herbarium sheet.

Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination.

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling's world within a world; Twain's slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.

The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There's no other explanation: almost all the tree's mass has come from the very air.

Wilderness is gone. Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.

Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.

Do you believe human beings are using resources faster than the world can replace them?

No strangeness stranger than the strangeness of living things.

Extinction) Twelve million or more species, less than a tenth of them counted. And half of them will snuff out in her lifetime.

You're studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people.

Forest has succumbed to chemically sustained silviculture. Four billion years of evolution, and that's where the matter will end. Politically, practically, emotionally, intellectually: Humans are all that count, the final word. You cannot shut down human hunger. You cannot even slow it. Just holding steady costs more than the race can afford.