355 Quotes About Ecology

It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.

The first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else.

A dam is monumentally static; it tries to bring a river under control, to regulate its seasonal pattern of floods and low flow.

Once you learn to read the land, I have no fear of what you will do to it, or with it. And I know many pleasant things it will do to you.

If the United States had been smart about protecting wetlands as its cities developed, we'd be saving hundreds of lives and many billions of dollars in flood insurance and flood-induced repair bills every year

Nature is…animals, trees, the weather…the bioregion, the ecosystem. It is both the set and the contents of the set. It is the world and the entities in that world. It appears like a ghost at the never-arriving end of an infinite series: crabs, waves, lightning, rabbits, silicon…Nature.

Whitehaven Beach brought me back to my days when a trip to the library was an adventure. The author lives on the beach, so it i natural for kids to turn their beach home into an imaginary rocket ship as they travel the world so save the beaches from marauders. Their young imaginations are fired up unlike adults whose live experience has deprived them of this kind of adventure. Oh, to be a kid again!

A single Seaway ship can hold up to six million gallons of vessel-steadying ballast water that gets discharged at a port in exchange for cargo. And that water, scientists would learn after it was too late, can be teeming with millions, if not billions, of living organisms.

For the forest, the shared purpose is life itself, existence; everything extraneous stripped away by its necessity. Perhaps the goal of the spiritual life is to strip away everything frivolous as well, to pare it all back to the necessity of connection with the other. If we worship in the sincere presence of that power that takes away our forever-unmet need of things superfluous, we enter the real ecology of the meeting, where all is web.