355 Quotes About Ecology

We have forgotten our natural ability to live together, including with our fellow nonhumans, because we have lost the sacred collective touchstone that anchors us to the fundamental truth that our lives emerge, grow, and thrive from the same great forces and processes that drive the evolution of the universe.

I envision an integration of multiple sources of wisdom, diverse knowledge systems, and unexpected creative collaborations—all necessary ingredients for a future worth having: a future that embraces the embodied sacred.

Our various origin stories seek to express the relationship between human minds and what we might call nature’s mind, or what ancient people saw as the thoughts of a creator.

We never were separate from nature and never will be, but the dominant culture on earth has long imagined itself to be apart from nature and destined one day to transcend it. We have lived in a mythology of separation.

Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.

It may be said, in broad-brush terms, that the primary purpose of life is the continuation of life. A deep program for survival and reproduction underwrites the complex cycles of life, in which death is the grand equalizer. There is, however, a peculiar novelty: human awareness of the cycle of life and a capacity to anticipate our own, individual death.

I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.

The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up. Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to it. The dead are better, aren't they? The dead don't betray or harm. They've already done all they can do. I can't figure out what people mean or who they are or whether they can be trusted, so, forget them. Don't even try anymore. For now at least, forget the living.