Ecosystems Quotes - Page 5

• There is no waste in functioning natural ecosystems. All organisms, dead or alive, are potential sources of food for other organisms. A caterpillar eats a leaf; a robin eats the caterpillar; a hawk eats the robin. When the plant, caterpillar, robin, and hawk die, they are in turn consumed by decomposers.

  G. Tyler Miller

  Science, Robins, Alive

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• The question for me is whether we can keep Earth a safe, pleasant place for humankind and the ecosystems we rely on.

  Kate Sheppard

  Earth, Safe, Environment

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• Finding mechanisms for putting carbon back into landscapes enhances biodiversity. More biodiverse ecosystems store more carbon, more securely and are more resilient to the impacts of climate change.

  Will Steffen

  Impact, Climate, Landscape

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• Growing up in rural Louisiana, the ecosystem around our home wove harmoniously into our family and into our daily life. Every life lesson that trickled its way into my being came from a mutually respectful relationship between the environment and my family.

  Ian Somerhalder

  Growing Up, Life Lesson, Home

  "Interview with United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Ian Somerhalder". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. May 01, 2014.

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• We are clearcutting virgin forests around the world, and 95 percent of species in the clearcut zone have never been studied. So we clearcut a part of the virgin forest and now part of our ecosystem has been wiped out. Some of it may grow back, and some of it won't.

  Horst Rechelbacher

  Forests, World, May

  Source: www.edgemagazine.net

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• Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.

  Jonas Salk

  Environmental, Realizing, Ifs

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• What's sad is that nobody knows the constitution of the ecosystem that has just been destroyed. Is it an important future food? Is it an important medicine? What can it do for future generations - or present generations?

  Horst Rechelbacher

  Medicine, Important, Generations

  Source: www.edgemagazine.net

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• While ants exist in just the right numbers for the rest of the living world, humans have become too numerous. If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plants and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land ecosystems almost everywhere.

  E. O. Wilson

  Animal, Land, Oil

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• It's a flaw in our argument, for sure. By any reading of evolutionary theory, creationists ought to have died out ages ago. They serve no function in the planet's ecosystem, and no other species has survived so long while in such fundamental disagreement with observable reality. If I wasn't such an ardent believer in secular materialism, I'd wager this is really troubling Darwin in the afterlife.

  Richard Dawkins

  Reading, Reality, Afterlife

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• The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the environment, to the ecosystem. This is the Gaian mind. This is what the goddess really is. The goddess is a network of connective intelligence that is operating on this planet.

  Terence McKenna

  Mind, Pipeline, Mysterious

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• An ecosystem that has the maximum amount of diversity is the richest.

  Robert Greene

  Diversity, Maximum, Amount

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• Increasingly, we will be faced with a choice: whether to keep the oceans for wild fish or farmed fish. Farming domesticated species in close proximity with wild fish will mean that domesticated fish always win. Nobody in the world of policy appears to be asking what is best for society, wild fish or farmed fish. And what sort of farmed fish, anyway? Were this question to be asked, and answered honestly, we might find that our interests lay in prioritizing wild fish and making their ecosystems more productive by leaving them alone enough of the time.

  Charles Clover

  Ocean, Mean, Winning

  Charles Clover (2008). “The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and what We Eat”, p.313, Univ of California Press

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• I believe citizens are beginning to realize that their birthright, a healthy ecosystem, has been stolen, and they want it back.

  Charles Clover

  Believe, Healthy, Citizens

  Charles Clover (2008). “The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and what We Eat”, p.317, Univ of California Press

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• Anyplace of work where you have a cross section of work, you have mini-ecosystem. A little representation of what the planet is. You have the Alpha Dog. You have the young ones, the old ones. The pissed off one. The quiet one.

  Ryan Reynolds

  Dog, Littles, Pissed Off

  Source: www.movieweb.com

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• Sloths actually are like furry living ecosystems all by themselves! Algae grows on their fur and they are also home to "sloth moths" who call them home and drink their tears.

  Ann Burton

  Home, Sloth, Tears

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life.

  Charles Stross

  Self, Space, Support

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• We're handing them [young people & future generations] a climate system which is potentially out of their control. We're in an emergency: you can see what's on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction

  James Hansen

  Future, Sea, People

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• If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world's ecosystems would collapse

  David Attenborough

  Nature, Animal, World

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• There's no point bleating about the future of pandas, polar bears and tigers when we're not addressing the one single factor putting more pressure on the eco system than any other - namely the ever-increasing population.

  Chris Packham

  Population, Pandas, World

  "TV host Chris Packham: My really wild idea to tax all kids". Daily Mirror Interview, www.mirror.co.uk. April 5, 2011.

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• We cannot interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention to both the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well-being of future generations.

  Pope John Paul II

  Generations, Attention, Climate Change

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• In other words, people should be placed in parks within ecosystems instead of parks placed in human communities. We need vast areas of the planet where humans do not live at all and where other species are free to evolve without human interference. We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.

  Paul Watson

  People, Community, Parks

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• I would argue that practices that destroy ecosystems always destroy jobs.

  Bruce Babbitt

  Jobs, Practice, Arguing

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• For the economy itself will die if our ecosystems collapse.

  Leonardo DiCaprio

  Economy, Climate Change, Collapse

  Address at the United Nations Climate Summit, delivered 23 September 2014, New York, NY

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• Big businesses aren't the only ones in the economic ecosystem. Nobody should fall behind because of an unfair structure.

  Park Geun-hye

  Fall, Economic, Unfair

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• Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so.

  E. O. Wilson

  Science, Organization, Cells

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