Quotes About Ecology

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

Botanists have a tradition of never revealing the exact location of a rare plant. Contact between humans and rare plants is generally risky for the plants.

The tragedy is that there is so much more incentive - money - to destroy the ecology than there is to preserve it.

The theory of founder effects does not explain how novel features like plumage traits arise.

I'm interested in how the bare bones of the planet, things that aren't alive, are transformed into things that are alive.

Seoul promises to make a big investment in the transition of ecology and civilization that will transform the green crisis into a green opportunity.

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.

Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth. Capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth.

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything---evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing---it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing.

Malcolm said, "You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct. Don't you have that feeling now?

Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

Save the Earth" and beneath that, "There's Nowhere Else to Go.

Expertise is no shield against failure to see ahead. Paul Erlich, a brilliant academic who has devoted his entire life to ecological issues, has been wrong in nearly all his major predictions. He was wrong about diminishing resources, he was wrong about the population explosion, and he was wrong that we would lose 50% of all species by the year 2000. His lifelong study of these issues did not prevent him from being wrong.

If we are gone tomorrow the Earth will not miss us.

Would-be green capitalism is nothing but a publicity stunt, a label for the purpose of selling a commodity, or - in the best of cases - a local initiative equivalent to a drop of water on the arid soil of the capitalist desert.

Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. They are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity.

At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature—but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst. . . .

Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well adapted to man-made places. They don't grow in forests or prairies—in "the wild." Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad sidings, hard by dumpsters and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live, in other words, and hardly anywhere else.

The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom—a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.)

In wildness is the preservation of the world," Thoreau once wrote; a century later

one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy. According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food. (These

All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby.

A mouse is the size of a mouse for a good reason, and a mouse that was the size of an elephant wouldn't do very well.

the feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong.