Quotes About Ecology

As the temperature drops, single voices—clear and hollow—replace the keening chorus: the ancient speech of frogs. One word becomes clear, as if spoken in English. "Hear! Hear! Hear! The world is more than your thoughtless commute. We, the collateral, are your wealth, your teachers, your security, your family . Your strange hunger for ease should not mean a death sentence for the rest of Creation.

The question of goldenrod and aster was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.

What I'm looking for, I suppose, is balance, and that is a moving target. Balance is not a passive resting place - it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the taking out and the putting in.

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.

How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like?

The process of ecological succession is like a positive feedback loop, a magnet of life attracting more life.

G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a pioneering ecologist, spoke eloquently of the living world as "the ecological theater and the evolutionary play." This decaying log is a stage, and the scenes take place in the gaps, where the colonists act out their drama.

The genus Dicranum has undergone considerable adaptive radiation, that is, the evolution of many new species from a common ancestor

Adaptive radiation, whether in Darwin's finches or in Dicranum, creates new species that are well adapted for specific ecological niches.

Imagine if a developer, eying open land for a shopping mall, had to ask the goldenrod, the meadowlarks, and the monarch butterflies for permission to take their homeland. What if he had to abide by the answer? Why not?

Perpetual growth is simply not compatible with natural law

Here on the waste beds there are expanses without a living thing, but there are also teachers of healing and their names are Birch and Alder, Aster and Plantain, Cattail, Moss, and Switchgrass ... Nitrogen-fixing legumes in abundance, and clovers of all kinds, have also come to do their work ... Plants are the first restoration ecologists. They are using their gifts for healing the land, showing us the way.

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants. It is medicine for the earth.

It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great sadness, a "species loneliness"—estrangement from the rest of Creation.

ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, "we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

Clumsy at first, from generations of sitting on the sidelines, we stumble until we find the rhythm. We know these steps from deep memory, handed down from Skywoman, reclaiming our responsibility as cocreators. Here in a homemade forest, poets, writers, scientists, foresters, shovels, seeds, elk, and alder join in the circle with Mother Cedar, dancing the old-growth children into being. We're all invited. Pick up a shovel and join the dance.

This is the grammar of animacy.

map of balance and harmony.

How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can't imagine the generosity of geese?

I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents

Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land. Therefore, reconnecting people and the landscape is as essential as reestablishing proper hydrology or cleaning up contaminants.

Nuts are like the pan fish of the forest, full of protein and especially fat—"poor man's meat

as ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, "we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9: 35 a.m., I am usually in a lecture hall at the university, expounding about botany and ecology— trying, in short, to explain to my students how Skywoman's gardens, known by some as "global ecosystems," function.