Quotes About Ecology

But the new picture doesn't automatically legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terra-forming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

Let the Kayapó burn the rainforest—they know what they're doing.

Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.

Who can explain why one species ranges widely and is very numerous, and why another allied species has a narrow range and is rare? Yet these relations are of the highest importance, for they determine the present welfare, and, as I believe, the future success and modification of every inhabitant of this world.

We here see in two distant countries a similar relation between plants and insects of the same families, though the species of both are different. When man is the agent in introducing into a country a new species this relation is often broken:

If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants.

Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!

Did man, after his first inroad into South America, destroy, as has been suggested, the unwieldy Megatherium and the other Edentata?

A culture," the poet W. H. Auden observed, "is no better than its woods.

Animals interest me more than anything else.

There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves.

We are all burnt by ultraviolet rays. We all contain water in about the same ratio as Earth does, and salt water in the same ratio that the oceans do. We are poems about the hyperobject Earth.

The ecological thought affects all aspects of life, culture, and society.

We can get a sense of it, to be sure, though it will upgrade our ideas of real and thing to boot. Ecology shows us that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it's also a thinking that is ecological. Thinking the ecological thought is part of an ecological project. The

The average yard is both an ecological and agricultural desert. The prime offender is short-mown grass, which offers no habitat and nothing for people except a place to sit, yet sucks down far more water and chemicals than a comparable amount of farmland.

On a visit to a hardware store I heard a man ask, What can I get to kill all the bugs in my yard? I nearly began shrieking.

Humanity was a function of nature. It could not, therefore, live separately from nature except in a self-deceiving masquerade. It could not live in opposition to nature except in a schizophrenic crime. And it could not blind itself to the wonders of nature without mutating into something too monstrous to love. Yes

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed

To watch an animal so exquisitely fitted in its world was better than any ballet.

Eliminate one species, and another increases in number to take its place

Mankind, which has always been a part of nature, has reached a point where it is too much for nature to accommodate.

If food was no longer obliged to make intercontinental journeys, but stayed part of a system in which it can be consumed over short distances, we would save a lot of energy and carbon dioxide emissions. And just think of what we would save in ecological terms without long-distance transportation, refrigeration, and packaging--which ends up on the garbage dump anyway--and storage, which steals time, space, and vast portions of nature and beauty.

Me: What will the Earth eat now that the humans are gone? Themroc: The Earth must become vegetarian.

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.