Quotes About Ecology

We know everything about the Earth now, except how to keep her alive.

What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.

I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness.

one honey fungus in Oregon covers almost four square miles and is thought to be nearly two and a half thousand years old.

And what of Nature itself, you say – that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? Well, it is not so much of an engine as you think. As for "red in tooth and fang," whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes I know that some passer-by has been getting life from books.

People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother Nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on

To maintain, in this new situation, the old missionary attitude is not merely inexcusable but positively dangerous. In a world threatened with nuclear war, a world facing a global ecological crisis, a world more and more closely bound together in its cultural and economic life, the paramount need is for unity, and an aggressive claim on the part of one of the world's religions to have the truth for all can only be regarded as treason against the human race.

Without those hairless chinny apes, there might not be any invasive species at all.

Service learning connects classroom studies to real-world issues, with hands-on activities and problem solving. Youth can study biology and ecology by testing the water in their own community; or learn about statistics, calculating the food supply and usage at the local food bank.

We are using resources as if we had two planets, not one. There can be no 'plan B' because there is no 'planet B.'

If you can command a lot of attention, that's what is valuable, and many in the commercial ecology would like to have a piece of that attention.

I think very early on, my sisters and I understood the value of nature and what it can do for us, and that we are part of nature. Even if we are all seemingly intelligent beings and we're at the top of the food chain, that doesn't mean that we have to remove ourselves from nature.

Thus, Fertile Crescent and eastern Mediterranean societies had the misfortune to arise in an ecologically fragile environment. They committed ecological suicide by destroying their own resource base.

the north–south axes and ecological barriers within Africa and the Americas retarded the diffusion of crops and domestic animals. The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar ways in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions.

After people reached Australia, that continent lost its giant kangaroos, its 'marsupial lion', and other giant marsupials.

Today, 28% of the Dominican Republic is still forested, but only 1% of Haiti.

Australia / New Guinea today has no equally large mammals, in fact no mammal larger than 100-pound kangaroos. But Australia / New Guinea formerly had its own suite of diverse big mammals, including giant kangaroos, rhinolike marsupials called diprotodonts and reaching the size of a cow, and a marsupial "leopard." It also formerly had a 400-pound ostrichlike flightless bird, plus some impressively big reptiles, including a one-ton lizard, a giant python, and land-dwelling crocodiles.

But for physical effort on the bug's own part, the prize still goes to worms such as hookworms and schistosomes, which actively burrow through a host's skin from the water or soil into which their larvae had been excreted in a previous victim's feces. Thus

The near-simultaneous disappearance of so many large species raises an obvious question: what caused it? An obvious possible answer is that they were killed off or else eliminated indirectly by the first arriving humans. Recall

For example, typhus was initially transmitted between rats by rat fleas, which sufficed for a while to transfer typhus from rats to humans. Eventually, typhus microbes discovered that human body lice offered a much more efficient method of traveling directly between humans. Now that Americans have mostly deloused themselves, typhus has discovered a new route into us: by infecting eastern North American flying squirrels and then transferring to people whose attics harbor flying squirrels.

We have eco-friendly shrimp. We can make them; we have that technology. But we can never have an eco-friendly all-you-can-eat shrimp buffet. It doesn't work.

Informing all of Carson's work was the idea that although human beings are part of nature, we are distinguished by our power to alter it irreversibly.