Quotes About Biosphere

Fewer people, more wild animals. That feels like coming back from a time of illness. Like healing, like getting healthy. Population dynamics in play, as always. Maybe that makes us all living together in this biosphere some kind of supra-organism, who can say.

We therefore have a good chance of overcoming the problem of resource scarcity. The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In

Humans are destabilizing the global biosphere on multiple fronts. We are taking more and more resources out of the environment while pumping back into it enormous quantities of waste and poison, thereby changing the composition of the soil, the water, and the atmosphere

The collegiate idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.

The well-being of the biosphere is measured over millennia of history and necessitates a human consciousness that can reflect and project along a similar time table.

By enriching the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere from its impoverished pre-industrial levels, human beings have increased the productivity of the entire biosphere - so much so that roughly one out of every seven living things on the planet owes its existence to the marvelous improvement in nature that humans have effected.

Fundamentally, we need a mind-shift that reconnects our development to the biosphere to ensure good and safe lives for all in the future.

Our present biosphere is the outcome of about 4 billion years of evolution, and we can trace cosmic history right back to a Big Bang that happened about 13.7 billion years ago.

We are a biological species arising from Earth's biosphere as one adapted species among many; and however splendid our languages and cultures, however rich and subtle our minds, however vast our creative powers, the mental process is the product of a brain shaped by the hammer of natural selection upon the anvil of nature.

The human species is, in a word, an environmental hazard. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere.

Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere.

This is suicidal... our home is the biosphere. That's a very thin layer of air, water and land where all life exists. It's fixed, it can't grow, and yet we cling to this idea that the economy can grow forever. And it must. Well, it can't.

Our human dependence on the living processes of the earth was largely forgotten with the growth of industrial civilization. Now we are being forced to remember that Gaia is greater than we are and that the human economy is embedded within the ecology of the biosphere. So, in what sense is Gaia alive? And what difference does it make if we think of her as a living organism, as opposed to an inanimate physical system?

Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?

Green Swans, in essence, are about regeneration—of our societies, economies, and, most fundamentally, of the biosphere. This is where things must now go seriously exponential, in a good way.

The only truly dependable production technologies are those that are sustainable over the long term. By that very definition, they must avoid erosion, pollution, environmental degradation, and resource waste. Any rational food-production system will emphasize the well-being of the soil-air-water biosphere, the creatures which inhabit it, and the human beings who depend upon it.

We are, after all, an animal that was brought into being on this biosphere by these processes of sun and water and lead. And if we depart too far from them, we're departing too far from the mother, from our heritage.

Harvesting the biosphere is still the most fundamental human activity. Without that, everybody's dead, really. We could do quite well without microchips, or the business site of 'Atlantic Monthly,' the gated communities, Guccis, and high-growth GDP. But we cannot do without harvesting the crops and cutting down the wood.

Every day, the temperature of Sol's surface increases by five billionths of a degree, a change of no consequence for thousands of millennia to come. But a few hundred million years from now, barring a fix by our descendants, this relentless heating will substantially change Earth's biosphere in ways that might not be survivable for us.

A secular approach to Buddhism is thus concerned with how the dharma can enable humans and other living beings to flourish in this biosphere, not in a hypothetical afterlife. Rather than emphasizing personal enlightenment and liberation, it is grounded in a deeply felt concern and compassion for the suffering of all those with whom we share this earth.

After the emergence of intelligence, the story of any biosphere tended to get a lot simpler. It was a major reason for the silence of the stars.

There is a patent conflict between the need to reverse or at least to control the impact of our economy on the biosphere and the imperatives of a capitalist market: maximum continuing growth in the search for profit.

It took me four months in Biosphere 2 to make a pizza.

If we destroy the biosphere, then mankind will die. We all waste our time worrying about stupid wars and petty jealousy and greed, and all the time, we're sitting on a time bomb.