355 Quotes About Ecology

...sometimes we see things in animals that aren't really there. It's called transference, if that makes any sense. ...I think there are a lot of people who say they do things for animals when they're really doing it for themselves. They see things in animals that might not really be there. I think sometimes that hurts the animals in the end, and it hurts other people, too....There are people on both sides of the issue who think animals are more valuable than people are...

All the serious problems in the world today could have been solved when they were simple problems.

Ecological awareness expands the context of life; it also enlarges who we are as a person.

Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,things standing shall fall,but the moving ever shall stay.

All have their worth and each contributes to the worth of the others.

We are made beautiful and glorious not by the ways in which we differ from the rest of the biosphere, but by our place, perhaps unique in the universe, in this community of living things.

...one of the great tasks of ecological thinking will be to develop an ecological civicism that restores the organic bonds of community without reverting to the archaic blood-tie at one extreme or the totalitarian "folk philosophy" of fascism at the other.

For the natural polytheist, whose gods arise in and from the natural material world, this challenge is not even always a metaphor. Our gods not only have transcendent eyes and metaphysical hands. They have antlers and feathers, hooves and scales, fangs and horns and wings and fins and claws. They are in the lands we strip for veins of precious ore. They are in the waters we poison.

For the natural polytheist who finds her gods in the rivers and mountains, in the deep-rooted giants looming above the canopy and in the tiny creatures that move beneath them, ecology gives us a glimpse into a kind of living anatomy of the divine, a theology of physical as well as spiritual life. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God