Quotes About Ecology

A 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 figures would be about 4 percent higher if the salad were grown conventionally.) I

always living on less than you have and more lightly than you need to.

For though we may be the earth's gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role—that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

He writes in his book that mycelia—the vast, cobwebby whitish net of single-celled filaments, called hyphae, with which fungi weave their way through the soil—are intelligent, forming "a sentient membrane" and "the neurological network of nature.

Wes Jackson calls our species "homo the homogenizer.")

Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.

It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness.

My father's music was about revolution and changing the hearts and minds of people through love and the deliverance of everyone. We hope our brothers and sisters will follow our path and really start to consider ecology and utilizing material that benefits not only yourself but the people.

The site I landed on feels much more isolated than it really is; it's almost magical. Within its limited radius, there was a whole range of the local ecology.

That the role of size has been to some degree neglected in biology may lie in its simplicity. Size may be a property that affects all of life, but it seems pallid compared to the matter which makes up life. Yet size is an aspect of the living that plays a remarkable, overreaching role that affects life's matter in all its aspects.

We think there is an ecological problem, but the real problem is irresponsible growth of human population.

Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else.

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In

In Australia and the Americas," says Tim Flannery, "the animals probably didn't know enough to run away.

However tall it grows, a tree is just a few pounds of living cells thinly spread between roots and leaves.

dried cow pies—known euphemistically and rather charmingly as "surface coal.

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There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals—220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears.

But California is a dramatic example of what's going on. Wildfires now occur there five times more often than in the 1970s, largely because the fire season is getting longer and the forests there now contain much more dry wood that's likely to burn.

A hotter climate means there will be more frequent and destructive wildfires.

A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you look at the world's mammals by weight, 96 percent of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.

Think selfishly,' Daine said, trying to make these arrogant two-leggers see what she meant. 'You can't go on this way. Soon you will have no forests to get wood from or to hunt game in. You poison water you drink and bathe and fish in. Even if you keep the farms, they won't be enough to feed you if the rest of the valley's laid waste. You'll starve. Your people will starve- unless you buy from outside the valley, and that's fair expensive. You'll ruin Dunlath.

Bad things always happen when an animal is overselected for any single trait. Nature will give you a nasty surprise.

The human race will be the cancer of the planet.