Quotes About Interconnectedness

If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then a family is more like a rope. We're lots of fragile little strands, and we survive by bricking hopelessly intertwined with each other.

If a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then a family is more like a rope. We're lots of fragile little strands, and we survive by becoming hopelessly intertwined with each other. The happiest families I ever met were all frayed... but they were also tighter than a hangman's noose.

In a culture in which cosmology is alive, children are taught by the Sun and Moon, by the rainfall and the starlight, by the salmon run and the germinating seed.

Human beings are not meant to live alone. There is a fundamental biological imperative that propels you and every organism on this planet to be in a community, to be in relationship with other organisms.

Nothing is unexplained. Nature is a chain reaction. Everything is dependent on something else. The smallest is as important as the largest

If you are living your life and I am mentally living your life, who is here living mine? We're both over there. Being mentally in your business keeps me from being present in my own. I am separate from myself, wondering why my life doesn't work.

You ever get the feeling your life is a string festooned with bells and tie4d to hundreds of others you don't know anything about? And that sometimes somebody pulls their string, and your bells ring? Gary looked at me a long moment before rather gently saying, Yes and no, darlin'. We all get that feeling from time to time. Difference is, with you, it could be real.

Wherever citrus production dominates, a rather distinctive social life has long existed. This citrus belt complex of peoples, institutions, and relationships has no parallel in rural life in America. It is neither town nor country, neither rural nor urban. It is a world of its own.

Economists don't seem to have noticed that the economy sits entirely within the ecology.

Beings who've succeeded on earth for millennia don't seek, and should not require, our approval. They belong here as do we. We do ourselves no favors by asking whether their existence is worth our while. We are hardly in a position to judge, hurtling and lurching along as we are with no goal, no plan except: bigger, faster, more.

Caltech brain researcher John Allman says that through agriculture and other ways of reducing daily hazards of existence, humans domesticated themselves. We now depend on others to provide food and our shelter. We're a lot like poodles in that regard.

Shrinking forests, melting ice, plowed grasslands, raging fires, drying rivers, and dying corals — diminished of all the major habitats, proxy for all who live therein, means that the numbers of free-living animals are the lowest ever, and mostly falling, across the board. It means something acutely awful, I think: that the human species has made itself incompatible with the rest of Life on Earth.

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together.

A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of he stars.

Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and teach their young in rookeries. The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity; the incompleteness of our understanding humbles us.

We are, you and I, at least one of the ways that the Universe knows itself

We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Each created entity is in symbiotic relationship with every other and in such a way that any act reverberates out and affects the whole, shaking this web with varying degrees of intensity.

God is the God of the entire cosmos; God has to do with every creature, and every creature has to do with God, whether they recognize it or not.

Human history is a Gaian dream.

our cooperation extends all around the globe. The next time you buy something—shoes, a computer, a bunch of bananas—look at where it was made. For most of us, it is impossible to survive without the help of thousands of strangers all over the world. We have never met these people, but they are enmeshed with us in globally extended networks