Quotes About Ecosystem

Natural capital is easy to overlook because it is the pond we swim in. One can live perfectly well without ever giving a thought to the sulfur cycle or wetland functions. Only when the benefits nature provides are disrupted do we take notice.

Market in India is big enough for several brands. For us, it's about innovation, making best product, and making the ecosystem better and better. If we do that well, then more people will switch from Android to iOS.

The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation.

The global climate is a complex interactive system, with all kinds of nonlinear feedback loops.

The soil is not a mass of dead debris, merely resulting from the physical and chemical weathering of rocks; it is a more or less homogeneous system which has resulted from the decomposition of plant and animal remains. It is teeming with life.

Not that I subscribe to the utilitarian view that plants are only good for what we can get out of them—it should be enough to add another beautiful (or even plain) item to nature's inventory. We need to know what there is in the world for us to look after, regardless of its potential use.

How many wild animals can be sustainably killed for the many millions of pets that people keep?

Progress does not have to be patented to be worthwhile. Progress can also be measured by our interactions with nature and its preservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and the potential for healing?

She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems. If forests were patentable, she'd get an ovation.

The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.

A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axmen who destroy it.

Berries may compete to be eaten more than animals compete for the berries.

A country watches dumbstruck as New England's priceless chestnuts melt away. The tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food—the most harvested tree in the country—is vanishing.

She has seen dieback across the West. Aspens are withering. Grazed on by everything with hooves, cut off from rejuvenating fire, whole groves are vanishing. Now she sees a forest, spreading across these mountains since before humans left Africa, giving way to second homes. She sees it in one great glimpse of flashing gold: trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

The boy thinks: Something slow and purposeful wants to turn every human building into soil.

The world depends on so many different species, each a nutty experiment

I do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism, of which mankind is a functional part—the mind, perhaps.

There are no individuals. There aren't even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.

The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.

Everything in the forest is the forest. Competition is not separable from endless flavors of cooperation.

Maybe it's useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.

a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free. A device so beautiful it's the stuff of poems.

The understory fills up with tracks like longhand accusations scribbled on the snow.

Creatures, all of whome heard humans and knew them as just a part of the wider network of sounds. Living things of every gauge, for whom the roadside bar was just another mound in the continuous test of the landscape, just another swarming node in the biome to exploit.