Quotes About Ecology

The fact that as the population of any species grows, the pressure on its natural resources increases and competition becomes more severe.

Nothing truly wild is unclean.

When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)

Nevertheless, again and again, in season and out of season, the question comes up, What are rattlesnakes good for? As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God's ways....Anyhow, they are all, head and tail, good for themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life.

Here are the roots of all the life of the valleys, and here more simply than elsewhere is the eternal flux of nature manifested.

Like most other things not apparently useful to man, it has few friends, and the blind question, Why was it made? goes on and on with never a guess that first of all it might have been made for itself.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains — beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

Nevertheless, again and again, in season and out of season, the question comes up, What are rattlesnakes good for? As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God's ways....Anyhow, they are all, head and tail, good for themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life. -from the essay Yellowstone Park

Nevertheless, again and again, in season and our of season, the question comes up, What are rattlesnakes good for? As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were Gods' ways.... Anyhow, they are all, head and tail, good for themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life.

The trees and the muscled mountains are the world – but not the world apart from man – the world and man – the one inseparable unit man and his environment. Why they should ever have been understood as being separate I do not know.

Extinction is not an event, it is a chain reaction!

Our personal consumer choices have ecological, social, and spiritual consequences. It is time to re-examine some of our deeply held notions that underlie our lifestyles.

Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.

If your homeland were invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?

...when food is shared in a fair way, with solidarity, when no one is deprived, every community can meet the needs of the poorest. Human ecology and environmental ecology walk together.

To survive, humans need food, water, and air. Yet biodiversity, the Earth's bodies of water, and the planet's atmosphere are all under threat.

Producing food to eat is the single most destructive environmental activity humans engage in.

We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men

Le api originariamente si sono evolute dalle vespe circa 125 milioni di anni fa, smettendo di essere predatrici per diventare cercatrici di nettare e di polline.

Orcas continually prove there are more things in the ocean than are dreamt of in our science.

Former petroleum industry analyst Jan Lundberg puts it this way, "The nation and most of the rest of the world is chasing a technofix instead of adjusting to ecological/economic reality.

hugelkultur, a method of burying logs in earthen mounds as the basis for gardens, a nifty function-stacking that stores nutrients and moisture in the soil while sequestering the carbon of waste wood that might otherwise be burned.

Ecology is often confused with environmentalism, while in fact, environmentalism often leaves out the fact that people, too, can be a legitimate part of an ecosystem.