Quotes About Ecosystems

Yet fungal eating is often generous; it makes worlds for others.

As many as 1 million plant and animal species (of 8 million total) are threatened with extinction, some within a few decades.

concluded that "nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history." It noted that 75% of all land has been "severely altered" by human actions, as has 66% of the world's ocean area. Ecosystems are collapsing, and biodiversity is disappearing. As many as 1 million plant and animal species

While some livestock farms are much better than others, there are none in this country that look like natural ecosystems. Nature has no fences.

Farming and fishing are the major causes of the collapse of both marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Meat - consumed in greater quantities by the rich than by the poor - is the strongest cause of all.

Midway between land and water, freshwater marshes are among the most highly productive ecosystems on earth, rivaling the tropical rainforest.

Restoration is imperative for healing the earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them.

Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9: 35 a.m., I am usually in a lecture hall at the university, expounding about botany and ecology— trying, in short, to explain to my students how Skywoman's gardens, known by some as "global ecosystems," function.

Mosses are the amphibians of the plant world. They

Mosses are successful by any biological measure—they inhabit nearly every ecosystem on earth and number as many as 22,000 species. Like my niece finding small places to hide, mosses can live in a great diversity of small microcommunities where being large would be a disadvantage.

Our world is made up of a myriad of microcosms, of tiny worlds, each with its own habitues, every one known to the others.

to undertake a gargantuan task: calculate the value of all the services provided by all the ecosystems, from the forest to the floodplains to the open ocean, across the world... they came up with a number- $33 trillion a year- a headline-grabbing figure that was almost twice the global gross national product.

If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.

Reading about declining owl populations led him to deforestation which led to soil erosion which led to ocean pollution which led to coral bleaching, everything warming, melting, and dying faster than scientists predicted, every system on the planet connected by countless invisible threads to every other:

The thing the ecologically illiterate don't understand about an ecosystems is that it is a system…that's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

Our forests offer much more than just beautiful landscapes and wildlife. Each one has a different story to tell.

The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion.

We are on a crazy strategy with our central bank. It's good to have alternative ecosystems. It's not that the dollar will go away, but we need other options if it crashes or wildly inflates.

Only one of the many life support systems on which we depend - soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity - need fail for everything to slide.

Global avian populations are perilously declining because of human-wrought habitat degradation, and many individual avian injuries are at root human-caused.

If we lose the forests, we lose our only teachers.

Today's environmentalists turn a blind eye as 25 million people tramp through delicate ecosystems, set fire to national parks, kill livestock, dump tons of soiled diapers and Pepsi bottles in the desert, and deface ancient Native American sites. Political correctness

There is no solution available, I assure you, to save Earth's biodiversity other than the preservation of natural environments in reserves large enough to maintain wild populations sustainably. Only Nature can serve as the planetary ark.