Ecotones Ecology Quotes

My passion for human ecology was not a drive for closure - but rather the joy of endless openings and newfound connections. There is no final goal or perfect completion, only the expanding experience of being alive. ~ Richard J. Borden

The revulsion towards and violent detachment from nature leads to its desecration, to the destruction of the organic conception of the world as a cosmos, as an order of forms reflecting a higher meaning, as the 'visible manifestation of the invisible' - a conception (of Indo-European origin) which is an integral part of the Classical view of the world and which also lies at the basis of various forms of knowledge of a different sort compared to profane, modern science. ~ Julius Evola

I do see a lot of the hard end of ecology, and my feeling is that we live on a super-exciting planet but a super-fragile one. ~ Bear Grylls

We cannot wholly rely, as though it were Medieval times, [on the notion that] the only reality is what we see in front of us. There are germs. There are changes that are happening in our planet's ecology that are happening over such a long period of time that we cannot see the changes. ~ John Hodgman

Well, I think I was always sort of reflecting where I was and my sense of surroundings and ecology, urban or country, or foreign, living in Europe, very affected by all of that. ~ Daniel Berrigan

For those of us who have come to believe that unless we are thinking we are wasting time, it may be challenging to simply linger with a beautiful sunset, an exquisite painting, or an arresting piece of music. The intellect often reacts to the seductions of beauty by attempting to recapture us. ~ Carolyn Baker

Nature soon takes over if the gardener is absent. ~ Penelope Hobhouse

When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature's gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart's desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature's gifts, to use them well. ~ Charles Eisenstein

As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

At 1.24 am on 26 April 1986 Chernobyl's Unit 4 reactor exploded after staff disabled safety systems and performed an ill-advised experiment to check – ironically enough – the reactor's safety. ~ Mark Lynas

Think of all the mesquite in Texas, the pinyon pines, the acorns in Appalachia, every place has the possibility of mass production. It's an infrastructural system so nestled in ecology, it's a more beautiful ecology. ~ Joel Salatin

Continuity is at the heart of conservatism: ecology serves that heart. ~ Garrett Hardin

By ecology we understand the total science of the connections of the organism to the surrounding external world. ~ Ernst Haeckel

Try as you might, you'll never be able to please an environmentalist. You can stop using coal to heat your house, you can stop throwing out bottles and cans, you can have every factory in Canada shut down and you can buy only organic gluten-free non-GMO food, you can give up your favorite station wagon for a weird electric hybrid, you can stop developing film and buy a never-ending cycle of digital cameras, you can give up your job at a refinery or mill, and they'll still get after you for not enjoying yourself while doing so. ~ Rebecca McNutt

The investigation described in the subsequent pages bears close relation to three sciences. It was approached by the author from the standpoint of astronomy and a desire to understand the variations of the sun. It was hoped that these variations could be more accurately studied by correlation with climatic phenomena. But the science of meteorology is still comparatively new and supplies us only with a few decades of records on which to base our conclusions. So botanical aid was sought in order to extend our knowledge of weather changes over hundreds and even thousands of years by making use of the dependence of the annual rings of trees in dry climates on the annual rainfall. If the relationship sought proves to be real, the rings in the trunks of trees give us not only a means of studying climatic changes through long periods of years, but perhaps also of tracing changes in solar activity during the same time. Thus astronomy, meteorology, and botany join in a study to which each contributes essential parts and from which, it is hoped, each may gain a small measure of benefit. ~ A.E. Douglass

At first glance, northern hardwood and hemlock forests aren't very sexy - they are the accountants of the forest world, stable and consistent. ~ Peter Quinby

But as the Everglades continued to wither, a few of their colleagues began to wonder if conservation really should mean development more than preservation. These heretics did not believe that God had created man in order to 'improve' or 'redeem' nature; they found God's grace in nature itself. ~ Michael Grunwald

Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris. ~ Edward Abbey

Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions. ~ Tony Kushner

Considering that we live in an era of evolutionary everything
evolutionary biology, evolutionary medicine, evolutionary ecology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary economics, evolutionary computing
it was surprising how rarely people thought in evolutionary terms. It was a human blind spot. We look at the world around us as a snapshot when it was really a movie, constantly changing. ~ Michael Crichton

Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. ~ Richard Louv

The thing that bothers me the most is the recklessness and greed of the local ranchers, who run too many cattle back here, choking with waste the creek that runs through my property. There's certain times of day that the cowboys like to send them turds down the river. Them f**kers piss me off. if you gotta mess up the ecology of the world in order to raise a bunch of cows, well eat somethin else. I'm not a fan of the cowboys. ~ Merle Haggard

Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today - apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes. ~ Murray Bookchin

The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship. This culture doesn't just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an ecological serial killer, and it's long past time for us to recognize the pattern. ~ Aric McBay

The Truly Healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating. ~ William H. Stewart

The land of Feyland didn't seem to have a discernible ecology – instead, rushing waves and sunny beaches gave way in the space of moments to snowy mountainsides and harsh, jutting cliffs. ~ Kailin Gow

What, then, is the soul of community? It is a desire to be connected with something greater than the egos of other people and the projects in which we might engage with them. Fundamentally, a successful human community is the unfolding of a spiritual dynamic. It cannot be contrived or made to happen. Rather, it erupts from our desire for the depths, and that desire is certain to constellate the shadow in ourselves and the other. ~ Carolyn Baker

The Earth was singing her revolution. She was calling her brave men and women to her defense. ~ Rivera Sun

A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know what you may be aiding to grow in it. ~ Charles Dudley Warner

The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result. ~ Donella H. Meadows

Nonetheless, as Seattle's leaders and residents would discover, this new urban environment was a palimpsest of exploitation, conflict, compromise, adaptation, and defeat. Physical forces and creatures beyond human control always pushed back. So, too, did the people who suffered from the changes. The new urban ecology was never the result of purely natural forces but the combination of human power magnified or thwarted by an unpredictable physical environment. The non-human environment that enfolded the city was not predetermined, nor was the poverty that the decades of shaping and reshaping Seattle had aggravated. In the end, the ecology of urban poverty was altogether a human creation. ~ Matthew Klingle

Embodied devotion and dedication is about how we give ourselves to the world; it's about our relationships with other embodied beings. ~ Julie J. Morley