Quotes About Mutualism

Tous pour un, un pour tous

The most successful of biology's creatures coexist in mutually beneficial ecosystems.

They taught me that all life forms are important to each other in our common quest for happiness and survival. That there is more to life than just yourself, your own family, or your own kind.

We worked to find not a middle-ground, but a new ground that would support us both.

Competing to be the best leads inevitably to a destructive, zero-sum competition that no one can win. As offerings converge, gain for one becomes loss for the other. This is the very essence of "zero sum.

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

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

It's so much nicer to be able to do your job with someone who's helping you, and you're helping them. Then, it becomes a tennis match where you're hitting the ball back and forth, and you're a team.

From the very beginning of the world, the other species were a lifeboat for the people. Now, we must be theirs.

Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants—a kind of mutual taming.

Only with severe need did the hyphae curl around the alga; only when the alga was stressed did it welcome the advances. When times are easy and there's plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward.

Black ash and basket makers are partners in a symbiosis between harvesters and harvested: ash relies on people as the people rely on ash. Their fates are linked.

The berries trust that we will uphold our end of the bargain and disperse their seeds to new places to grow, which is good for berries and for boys. They remind us that all flourishing is mutual. We need the berries and the berries need us. Their gifts multiply by our care for them, and dwindle from our neglect. We are bound in a covenant of reciprocity, a pact of mutual responsibility to sustain those who sustain us. And so the empty bowl is filled.

cooperating, not competing.

The grasses feed the ants with seeds and the ants feed the grasses with soil. They hand off life to one another. They understand their interconnections; they understand that the life of one is dependent on the life of all. Leaf by leaf, root by root, the trees, the berries, the grasses are joining forces, and so there are birds and deer and bugs that have come to join them. And so the world is made.

A horse can lend its rider the speed and strength he or she lacks - but the rider who is wise remembers it is no more then a loan.

The success of each is dependent upon the success of the other.

We owe our success to them, and also to the fact that, as the saying goes, two "Eds" are better than one.

Não é a árvore que deixa a flor, é a flor que deixa a árvore

The most natural privilege of man, next to the right of acting for himself, is that of combining his exertions with those of his fellow-creatures, and of acting in common with them.

All men being equally weak, each would feel equally in need of his fellow man's support and, knowing that cooperation was the condition of that support, would readily see that his private interest was subsumed in the general interest.

There is the True Knot, who live on the road and are in much the same line of work as myself. I leave them be and they are glad to return the favor.

Det fria samhället bygger på att vi på så många områden som möjligt ersätter huggens och slagens logik med det frivilliga handslagets logik. Att vi inte förbjuder, tvingar och kommenderar, utan att vi frågar, erbjuder och förhandlar.

When I talk about 'everyday communism', I am teasing a little. It is a provocative idea. But then we all do a lot of sharing a lot of the time. We don't draw up contracts for everything.