Ecosystems Quotes - Page 7

• The more people you run into, the greater your exposure, the easier it is to understand and empathize with other people. So if you are living in a much smaller ecosystem, it's probably easier to have simpler feelings.

  James Scott

  Running, People, Feelings

  "James Scott’s Violent Landscape". Interview with Royal Young, www.interviewmagazine.com. January 7, 2014.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

  E. O. Wilson

  Land, Ants, Would Be

  "An Interview With E.O. Wilson, the Father of the Encyclopedia of Life". Interview with David Pogue, www.nytimes.com. October 23, 2008.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change - as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

  Bill Gates

  People, Climate, Want

  "Q&A: Bill Gates on How to Stop Global Warming". Interview with Jeff Goodell, www.rollingstone.com. December 9, 2010.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• I run from Horatio Street down just past Battery Park City and back. It's amazing to run and see the Statue of Liberty and the ferries coming in. People think if you're not near Central Park, there's nowhere to go, but there's a whole ecosystem happening down here.

  Andy Cohen

  Running, Past, Thinking

  4 Copy quote

• What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.

  Terence McKenna

  Pain, Animal, People

  4 Copy quote

• Through scientific discovery and technological innovation, we enlist the forces of the natural world to solve many of the uniquely human problems we face - feeding and providing energy to agrowing population, improving human health, taking responsibility for protecting the environment and the global ecosystem, and ensuring our own Nation's security. Scientific discoveries inspire and enrich us, teaching us about the mysteries of life and the nature of the world.

  William J. Clinton

  Teaching, Responsibility, Discovery

  8 Copy quote

• We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities.

  Paul Watson

  Communication, People, Community

  8 Copy quote

• Leadership is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are part of a community, then leadership is everyone's vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Thinking, Self, Community

  105 Copy quote

• Since nature has the most sustainable ecosystem and since ultimately agriculture comes out of nature, our standard for a sustainable world should be nature's own ecosystem.

  Wes Jackson

  Agriculture, World, Should

  18 Copy quote

• Most floods are caused by man, not weather; deforestation, levee construction, erosion, and overgrazing all result in the loss of ecosystem services.

  Paul Hawken

  Loss, Men, Erosion

  "Capital Gains". www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

  74 Copy quote

  Show source

• The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche.

  Frank Herbert

  Niche, Realizing, Certain

  Frank Herbert (2003). “Dune”, p.427, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

  Wendell Berry

  Sacrifice, Community, Environmental

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and the sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.

  Rajendra K. Pachauri

  Survival, Earth, Global Warming

  4 Copy quote

• Sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem.

  David Abram

  Perception, Nervous, Sensory

  David Abram (2010). “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology”, p.134, Vintage

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• I owned a 1972 Plymouth Valiant that we bought for $125. It was infested with cockroaches and geckos - it was its own little ecosystem.

  Aaron Eckhart

  Cockroaches, Plymouth, Littles

  5 Copy quote

• Isimangaliso must be the only place on the globe where the oldest land mammal (rhinoceros) and the world biggest terrestrial mammal (elephant) share an ecosystem with the world's oldest fish (coelacanth) and the world's biggest marine mammal (whale)

  Nelson Mandela

  Marine, Whales, Land

  9 Copy quote

• Nature is flexible and resilient. Nature likes redundancy and dispersion. It is approximate and deals in gradients. All boundaries are permeable. Nature nests small systems like molecules within larger systems like cells, which in turn are nested in systems called organs, organisms, ecosystems. We grew from ancient one-celled ancestors. Nature likes mergers: we contain multitudes of other life forms within us. We stand at the crest of four billion years, bacteria molded into wondrous form, burning with a slow fire and about to take the next step.

  Robert Frenay

  Nature, Fire, Cells

  Robert Frenay (2006). “Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things”, p.32, Macmillan

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• An ecosystem, you can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another.

  Richard Lewontin

  Dna, Gmos, Knowing

  55 Copy quote

• Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. In ecology we speak of "wild systems." When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive.

  Gary Snyder

  Journey, Order, Hiking

  92 Copy quote

• TIME WENT ON, life with the children unfolding in its own ecosystem, small plastic toys seeming to grow up from the carpet like mushrooms, clothes falling to the floor like autumn leaves. Every once in a while she would blaze through the house and clean everything-at which point, the process would start all over.

  Erica Bauermeister

  Children, Growing Up, Fall

  Erica Bauermeister (2011). “Joy For Beginners”, p.63, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it - at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.

  Bill Gates

  Notebook, Smart, Phones

  "The PC Era Is Just Beginning". "Business Week" Magazine, www.businessweek.com. March 22, 2005.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• There are ecosystems like coral reefs [at risk] through ocean acidification. Those are valuable things that we should protect.

  Bill Gates

  Ocean, Risk, Coral Reefs

  "THE BILL GATES INTERVIEW: An energy miracle is coming, and it's going to change the world". Interview with Drake Baer, www.businessinsider.com. February 22, 2016.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• The Nile Project is the performing side of an effort that also includes education in music and environmental issues, raising awareness of the entire Nile basin as an ecosystem. With such vibrant music, the good intentions were a bonus; the Nile Project was a superb example of what I call small-world music, of what happens to traditions in the information age.

  Jon Pareles

  Issues, Effort, Environmental

  16 Copy quote

• The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.

  David Rockefeller

  Impact, Growth, Negative

  "The Unauthorized Biography of David Rockefeller", www.theeventchronicle.com. March 30, 2017.

  31 Copy quote

  Show source

• I find it quite useful to think of a free-market economy - or partly free market economy - as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem. Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well.

  Charlie Munger

  Animal, Thinking, People

  9 Copy quote