Janine Benyus Quotes About Animals

Quotes about: Animals

• If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates--the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes--have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria. ...After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.

  Janine Benyus

  New Year, Nature, Animal

• A solitary American monk named Thomas Berry writes that in our relationship to nature, we have been autistic for centuries. Wrapped tightly in our own version of knowledge, we have been unreceptive to the wisdom of the natural world. To tune in again, to have the "spontaneous environmental rapport" that characterized our ancestors, will take doing something that is perfectly delightful: reimmersing ourselves in the natural world.

  Janine Benyus

  Nature, Writing, Animal

• Virtually all native cultures that have survived without fouling their nests have acknowledged that nature knows best, and have had the humility to ask the bears and wolves and ravens and redwoods for guidance.

  Janine Benyus

  Nature, Humility, Animal

  Janine M. Benyus (2009). “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”, p.3, Harper Collins

• For a long time we have thought we were better than the living world, and now some of us tend to think we are worse, that everything we touch turns to soot. But neither perspective is healthy. We have to remember how it feels to have equal standing in the world, to be "between the mountain and the ant . . . part and parcel of creations," as the Iroquois traditionalist Oren Lyons says.

  Janine Benyus

  Nature, Animal, Thinking

• The real survivors are the Earth inhabitants that have lived millions of years without consuming their ecological capital, the base from which all abundance flows.

  Janine Benyus

  Nature, Real, Animal

  Janine M. Benyus (2009). “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”, p.9, Harper Collins

• The most irrevocable of [natures] laws says that a species cannot occupy a niche that appropriates all resources--there has to be some sharing. Any species that ignores this law winds up destroying its community to support its own expansion.

  Janine Benyus

  Nature, Animal, Wind

  Janine M. Benyus (2009). “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”, p.5, Harper Collins

• If we are to use our tools in the service of fitting in on Earth, our basic relationship to nature--even the story we tell ourselves about who we are in the universe--has to change.

  Janine Benyus

  Nature, Animal, Tools

  Janine M. Benyus (2009). “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”, p.8, Harper Collins

• In reality, we haven't escaped the gravity of life at all. We are still beholden to ecological laws, the same as any other life-form.

  Janine Benyus

  Nature, Animal, Reality

  Janine M. Benyus (2009). “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”, p.5, Harper Collins

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