Quotes About Ecology

Environment' is a term that creates no pictures in the mind, which is why I have begun to use 'natural world' or 'living planet' instead.

The sheep has caused more extensive environmental damage in this country than all the building that has ever taken place here.

And I think in this empty world there was room for me and a mountain lion. And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might spare a million or two humans And never miss them. Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost-face of that slim yellow mountain lion! D. H. Lawrence Mountain Lion

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. Gerard Manley Hopkins Inversnaid

It was when I saw these places in the 1980s that I felt called to do something about it. Seeing the stumps in the peat and the remnant trees, I asked myself: what's the message in the land? What's the story it's telling us? My question was: "What's Nature seeking to do here?" That is crucially different from the ethos of human domination. Rewilding is about humility, about stepping back.

Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

For four fifths of our history our planet was populated by pond scum.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

Over the long haul of life on this planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.

Nobody can legitimately claim to be a marine ecologist and conservationist while continuing to eat fish. It is the ultimate form of hypocrisy.

The destruction of our environment and resources cannot be stemmed unless the growth of the world's population is stemmed and ultimately reduced.

This plastic doesn't go away by itself, and to just let hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic be out there to be fragmented into these small and dangerous microplastics to me seems like an unacceptable scenario.

The problem is the magnitude of synthetic materials that are used briefly, then thrown away for eternity, thereby permanently changing the nature of the world.

of it was a plastic bottle

Address these environmental issues and you will address every issue known to man. And we keep dabbling in things that aren't really that important in the long term.

Even in the wake of Rachel Carson's best-selling Silent Spring, Americans in 1963 spent nearly as much money fighting crabgrass with chemical weed controls as they contributed to the American Cancer Society.

Endangered species are our friends.

The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.

'Humankind' is an attempt to think the human species without Nature and without humanity.

Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don't realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.

In the separation of the human species from nature, life goes awry.

The scariest animal is without doubt human beings. We are the only species that decimates the very environment that we require to live.

We, Homo sapiens, destroyed the majority of the large mammalian species in North America and Australasia just over 10,000 years ago. We, Homo sapiens, now are destroying the other species that presently exist on this planet at a rate of about 15,000 to 20,000 per year.

You look at the fact that for millions of years species on earth have been developing and we've been knocking them off at like a hundred a day.