Quotes About Ecosystem

Desert does not refer in any literal way to the ecosystem that, for lack of water, is hostile to life. The Desert is the affect that motivates the search for other instances of life in the universe and technologies for seeding planets with life;

Mammals, apparently, were pretty funny to a carnivorous plant.

Look,' Taryn said. 'I'm going to try this one more time. It's like that thing in Star Trek. The Starfleet regulation that says the doctor can relieve the captain of his duties. The writers probably got it from the real-life navy. Anyway, human beings are the captain. The doctor is the trees and the grasses and the marshes, and the beasts of the field and birds of the air. We humans were declared unfit for command.

We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

These days every wild place has, to one degree or another, been cut into and cut off.

If we assume, very conservatively, that there are two million species in the tropical rainforests, this means that something like five thousand species are being lost each year. This comes to roughly fourteen species a day, or one every hundred minutes.

Of the world's eight species of bears, six are categorized either as "vulnerable" to extinction or "endangered.

Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world's major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans' coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world's readily accessible fresh water runoff.

Unfortunately, the biggest tipping point, the one at which the ecosystem starts to crash, is mean pH 7.8, which is what we're expecting to happen by 2100," Hall-Spencer tells me, in his understated British manner. "So that is rather alarming.

Only in a place where the rules of the game remain fixed is there time for butterflies to evolve to feed on the shit of birds that evolved to follow ants.

coral cover in the Caribbean has in recent decades declined by close to eighty percent.

The way corals change the world—with huge construction projects spanning multiple generations—might be likened to the way that humans do, with this crucial difference. Instead of displacing other creatures, corals support them.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species". (...) We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

every year more non-indigenous species of mammals, birds, amphibians, turtles, lizards, and snakes are brought into the U.S. than the country has native species of these groups.

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles.

It demonstrates, he has written, that humans "are capable of driving virtually any large mammal species extinct, even though they are also capable of going to great lengths to guarantee that they do not.

on Easter Island concluded that it wasn't humans who deforested the landscape; rather, it was the rats

oceans' surface waters has already dropped, from an average of around 8.2 to an average of around 8.1. Like the Richter scale, the pH scale is logarithmic, so even such a small numerical difference represents a very large real-world change. A decline of .1 means that the oceans are now thirty percent more acidic than they were in 1800.

The whole new layer on top of what I was thinking about in the nineteen-seventies is climate change," Lovejoy told me. He has written that "in the face of climatic change, even natural climatic change, human activity has created an obstacle course for the dispersal of biodiversity," the result of which could be "one of the greatest biotic crises of all time.

Assuming that humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the oceans will continue to absorb carbon dioxide and will become increasingly acidified.

Researchers now believe it won't last out the Anthropocene. "It is likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to become ecologically extinct

Asian elephants have declined by fifty percent over the last three generations.

Under business as usual, by mid-century things are looking rather grim," he told me a few hours after I had arrived at One Tree. We were sitting at a beat-up picnic table, looking out over the heartbreaking blue of the Coral Sea. The island's large and boisterous population of terns was screaming in the background. Caldeira paused: "I mean, they're looking grim already.

The paper concluded that if current emissions trends continue, within the next fifty years or so "all coral reefs will cease to grow and start to dissolve.