Quotes About Ecology

I think everyone born in Oregon is an environmentalist by birth.

My niche will be to support the environment through the growth of organic agriculture.

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.

The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while.

I like the outdoors and the natural world. Environmental issues.

In the vocabulary of ecology there is a term for this type of human activity: "fishing down the food web." With the apex predator out of the way, species that are lower on the pyramid explode in abundance and become the new human harvest. It's a nearly universal phenomenon in the sea.

I am not master of words to tell you, Jack, the value of an exceedingly remote island to a naturalist, an uninhabited fertile volcanic island covered with a luxuriant vegetation, with no vile rats, dogs, cats, goats, swine, introduced by fools to destroy an Eden, an island untouched...

Few problems are less recognized, but more important than, the accelerating disappearance of the earth's biological resources. In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it is perched.

It would be wonderful if all the salmon we eat could be wild. But as one marine ecologist said to me recently, to continue to eat large wild fish at the rate we've been eating them we would need four or five oceans to support the crrent human population.

When reeling a fish in to not simply feel "the power of wildness intimately but the same time recognize the right of that wildness to continue".

Public art existed all along, but ecological art just naturally grew out of my thinking and writings in that area for years. I didn't get involved in it; I started what then became a movement.

Everything I do is the environment.

The biggest enemy we face is anthropocentrism. This is that common attitude that everything on this Earth was put here for [human] use.

We can't save the world without food. Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

So much world all at once--how it rustles and bustles! Moraines and morays and morasses and mussels, the flame, the flamingo, the flounder, the feather--

Environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business.

It wasn't obvious that repurposing every aspect of the planet for our own benefit wasn't really to our benefit at all.

Forget the planet, save the garden.

We are running this planet like a business in liquidation.

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.

Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live.

Girl, I turn that thing into a rain forest.

The old myth of unlimited growth alienates human beings from nature. To live sustainably we must respect nature and live by its rules. We must walk softly, leaving as small a footprint as possible.

Ecological concerns are daily news now (alas). And poets have been writing all along about stars and roses; it's not such a stretch now to bring in the Hubble telescope or dark matter or genetics.