Quotes About Ecology

the majority of our most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve these problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it.

If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet.

A land ethic for tomorrow should be as honest as Thoreau's Walden, and as comprehensive as the sensitive science of ecology. It should stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help-live logic of the great chain of life. If, in our haste to "progress," the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America.

lepidopterists give the noun a gerund's push toward the verb, and say that butterflies are nectaring...

Delphinidae, or oceanic dolphins, are the largest family of toothed whales, containing approximately thirty-seven species that range from the four-foot-long Hector's dolphin to the twelve-foot bottlenose dolphin to the twenty-five-foot orca, or killer whale.

Porpoises are a separate band entirely, although in the past the words "dolphin" and "porpoise" were often used interchangeably. The seven species of porpoises, or Phocoenidae, are smaller, and distinct from dolphins.

Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical.

We share our planet quite naturally with a permanent aeroplankton; a buoyant ecology too soft to hear, too small to see, but heavy with mood and meaning. Imagine being aware of all these airy inclusions - and you can begin to understand how it might feel to be able to smell really well.

You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.

There are more living organisms in a tablespoon of highly organic soil than there are people on the planet.

Stegosaurus was common only on well drained, dry soil.

I, Maggie, personally cannot tell you that you're going to save the planet. But what I do know is that we can draw a line to an issue that can conserve what we already have and what's left in a way that we can actually breathe the air, drink the water, actually grow things in soil - that matters in a real, practical way.

Sadly, in the name of progress, we have polluted the air, water, soil and the food we eat.

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

environmental movement sought to distance themselves from Leopold's "radical" suggestion that nature had an inherent value beyond its utility to man. If watersheds and old-growth forests had a "right to continued existence," as Leopold argued (a preview of the "rights of nature" debates that would emerge several decades later), then an owner's right to do what he wished with his land could be called into question.

Looking ahead to coming disasters, ecological and political, we often assume that we are all going to face them together, that what's needed are leaders who recognize the destructive course we are on. But I'm not so sure. Perhaps part of the reason why so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it.

By this point in history—after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises—free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman's Free to Choose and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in obscurity.

Ian Lipkin and his colleagues at Columbia University trapped 133 rats in New York City and discovered 18 new species of viruses that are closely related to human pathogens.

It was in the work that she came closest to finding herself, by which we don't mean gaining "self-knowledge" or understanding one's "true nature" but rather how at some point you can see most plainly that this is what you do, this is how you fit in the wider ecology.

If you're a Conservative, why aren't you behind conserving the land?

If we pollute the water and air, the vegetables and minerals, we destroy ourselves. We have to learn to see ourselves in things that we thought were outside of ourselves in order to dissolve false boundaries.

The Earth is so integral in the unity of its functioning that every aspect of the Earth is affected by what happens to any component member of the community. Because of its organic quality, Earth cannot survive in fragments….The integral functioning of the planet must be preserved.

I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.

Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.