Quotes About Ecosystem

You are what you eat eats.

For great many species today, "fitness" means the ability to get along in a world in which humankind has become the most powerful evolutionary force.

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.

You are what you eat" is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what you eat eats, too. And what we are, or have become, is not just meat but number 2 corn and oil.

either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands. So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as, indeed, with all the species sharing this most complicated farm. Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild.

What existential difference is there between the human being's role in this (or any) garden and the bumblebee's

Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.

I'm concerned about the ocean and the environment. And I love whales.

And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.

Make no mistake. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don't need us at all. We'd be dead in a day without them.

Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state's farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.)

22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.

It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it. The

Orange roughy, a sluggish but delicious ocean fish, were caught in vast numbers before marine biologists realized how desperately susceptible to extinction they were.

The World Wildlife Fund estimated in 1994 that the number of sharks killed each year was between 40 million and 70 million. As

In the early Tertiary, if you were the size of a bobcat you could be king.

As the economist Herman Daly once put it: "The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.

There is a critical threshold where the natural biosphere stops buffering us from the effects of our emissions and actually starts to amplify them.

ocean vents harbour some of the most extraordinary life on the planet.

can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean—but if you are not in a hurry it is marvellously efficient. Perhaps

Before this dumping was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites—almost fifty thousand of them in the Fallarones alone.

pair of Stephens Island wrens, which were found only on a small, isolated island in New Zealand's Cook Strait. All were killed by a lighthouse keeper's cat.

the starling, which was brought to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy German emigrant who had the odd, and in the case of starlings regrettable, idea that he should introduce to the American landscape all the birds mentioned in the writings of Shakespeare.