Quotes About Ecology

You can't eat fish. It's 6,000 parts DDT per million all over the world, not counting radiation.

When I was a kid, we never heard of smog, ozone depletion, acid rain, green house gasses.

AIDS is the revenge of the rain forest.

In a way, being born is a sort of ecological contagion. When you have longevity of family, we remember our grandfathers and maybe our great-grandfathers. We somehow don't have the capacity in modern life to remember further than that. All of the ramifications of their lives have an effect on us, and we're not aware of it.

I had always been fascinated by the whole idea that Australia was this different ecology and that when rabbits and prickly pears and other things from Europe were introduced into Australia, they ran amok.

Range Rovers are the greenest cars on the road.

Hedge-hogs abound in my gardens and fields.

I'd like to see the Amazon rainforests before they're all gone, and also the Galapagos - that's another one I'd like to do. I'd love to go diving in those areas. Basically, places, like, that are kind of going away, and I'd like to see them before they all become condos and high-rises.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

The color and shape of flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.

A sustainable business organization would be embedded in an "ecology of organizations," in which the waste of any one organization would be a resource for another.

The challenge of the 21st century will be to change the value system of the network society, so as to make it compatible with the demands of human dignity and ecological sustainability.

We must teach our children, our students, and our political and corporate leaders the fundamental facts of life—for example, that one species' waste is another species' food; that matter cycles continually through the web of life; that the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun; that diversity assures resilience; that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.

The most complex ecosystems on Earth are the tropical coral reef and the tropical rainforest. Both are characterized by large numbers of species, a rapid turnover of matter and energy, and extensive recycling of all essential materials. In both of these ecosystems, the principles of ecology are exhibited clearly and beautifully.

Since the early days of ecology, these multileveled arrangements have been called hierarchies. However, this term can be misleading, since it is derived from human hierarchies, originally from the Catholic Church and now from the military and corporate worlds. These have fairly rigid structures of domination and control, quite unlike the multileveled order found in nature.

Farmers used to plant different crops every year, rotating them so that the balance in the soil was preserved. No pesticides were needed, since insects attracted to one crop would disappear with the next. Instead of using chemical fertilizers, farmers would enrich their fields with manure, thus returning organic matter to the soil to reenter the ecological cycle.

Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.

You may depend on it that the bunting, emberiza miliaria, does not leave this country in the winter.

If we wipe out the fish, the oceans are going to die. If the oceans die, we die. We can't live on this planet with a dead ocean.

We face a simple choice. Either we go back to the days when everything was disposable and landfill dumps consumed our countryside at an increasing pace, or we recognise that we have limited resources and need to use them wisely and sustainably.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere.

We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we've smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don't think it's our privilege to behave this way.