Quotes About Ecology

The most highly regarded models predict that the climate of New England will become hostile to sugar maples within fifty years.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their (ecology students, any young people) vision. When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. 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?

One thing I've learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.

I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents, to know that, as ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, "we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.

Everybody lives downstream.

As I listen to them, I hear another whisper from the swaying stand of cattails, from spruce boughs in the wind, a reminder that caring is not abstract. The circle of ecological compassion we feel is enlarged by direct experience of the living world, and shrunken by its lack.

That is not a gift of life; it is a theft.

Met with Jim Watt. He's taking a lot of abuse from environmental extremists but he's absolutely right. People are ecology too and they cant forage for food and live in caves.

Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.

If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.

Soon after man shows up in new lands, the big game starts to go missing. […] A bad smell of extinction follows Home sapiens around the world. (37)

I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.

Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.

They slaughtered all the game they could find and so muddied the rivers and creeks with silt that the once plentiful salmon couldn't survive. The herds of elk and deer, the food source for Native Americans, were practically wiped out in one summer.

I've seen a film in which Dr Lorenz pointed out the difference between two colonies of cattle egrets, one free and one caged. The free ones, who had to provide for themselves, were monogamous and energetic and kept their numbers within ecologically reasonable limits. The captive egrets were promiscuous, idle, overbreeding and presumably going to hell fast.

Over and over again, we must stress that a healthy ecology is the basis for a healthy economy.

My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people … it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed … you can't miss it.

On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That's one reason why it's easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred about creation. And that is why it's easy for rabid environmentalists to hate chainsaws even though they snuggle into a mattress supported by a black walnut bedstead.

Earthworms will dance

If every kitchen in America had enough chickens attached to it to eat all of the scraps coming out of that kitchen, no egg industry or commerce would be necessary in the whole country.

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.

To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.

Zero of Animal Life probably about 300 fathoms.