Quotes about biosphere

A collection of quotes on the topic of biosphere, other, human, humanity.

Quotes about biosphere

“The living world is not the harsh domain of classical Darwinism, where each struggle against all, with every species, every organism and every gene competing for advantage against every other. Organisms are not skin-enclosed selfish entities, and competition is never unfettered. Life evolves, as does the universe itself, in a 'sacred dance' with an underlying field. This makes living beings into elements in a vast network of intimate relations that embraces the entire biosphere itself an interconnected element within the wider connections that reach into the cosmos.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/14108295.alexis_karpouzos?page=2

Selfishness, Universe, Relation ships, Dance

“The spiritual experience of oneness conduces to the same insight as reasoning through science. Both convey the insight of fundamental interconnection between ourselves, other people, other forms of life, the biosphere and, ultimately, the universe. Science and spirituality, far from being mutually exclusive and conflicting elements, are complementary partners in the search for the path that can enable humanity to recover its oneness with the world. Science demonstrates the urgent and objective need for it; and spirituality testifies to its inherent value and supreme desirability.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/14108295.alexis_karpouzos?page=2

Search, People, Universe, World

“The collegiate idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.”

P. J. O'Rourke book Parliament of Whores

Source: Parliament of Whores (1991), p. 198

Learning, Science

“We are consuming the past, present, and future of this biosphere, our only home, in an unthinking rush for profits and GDP that we call 'progress', belying our species name homo sapiens.”

Pavan Sukhdev (1960) Indian environmental economist

Foreword to Bankrupting Nature: Denying Our Planetary Boundaries https://books.google.it/books?id=CxHuA5AZ92AC&pg=PR0 by Anders Wijkman and Johan Rockström (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012), p. xi.

Home, Past, Future

“The interface between an industrial economy and the biosphere is what the industrial nation state can’t handle. So the new culture isn't based on nation state turf; it's based on biological, ecological processes, so the atmosphere is more the model than the land. And the science that would describe the processes of the atmosphere are more the new complex dynamical sciences, chaotic systems of clouds, rather than the clods.”

William Irwin Thompson (1938) American writer

Interview with Thompson in Life, Lindisfarne, and Everything, from Alexandria 4: The Order and Beauty of Nature edited by David Fideler (1997).

Science

“In our Post era, a new phenomenon has emerged expressing this new associative will of the species: I mean the super-networks of communication [Internet]. On this I conceive two images, one enthusiast and another disappointed: I see Gea as a body (the Biosphere) and as a mind or spirit (the Exosphere); the human creatures would be the neurons and the electronic networks the dendrites. Okay, an autistic geopsychology, full of traumas, and other psych pathologies. But let's not say that we already lack the means to understand each other.”

Jorge Majfud (1969) Uruguayan-American writer

Critica de la pasión pura (1998)

Disappointment, Communication, Understanding

“[…] the nation’s present and future well-being is now threatened by human control over the biosphere including its underlying mechanisms. As a result, a new challenge begets the state’s responsibility: anticipating and preventing future and irreversible degradations, even if it implies severe constraints to the present.”

Dominique Bourg (1953) French philosopher, specialist of sustainability

"For an Ecological Democracy" https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/for-an-ecological-democracy, Green European Journal, 2014.

Future

“In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.”

Neal Stephenson (1959) American science fiction writer

"The Technosphere"
In the Beginning... was the Command Line (1999)

Life, School, Dead

“The biosphere is now enriched with an other stratum, mid-way between the material and the spiritual, and that is the web of connections, a “virtual” reality made of communication by means of the new media. On a daily basis, we move around in this space with all the content we are capable of. This physically concretizes the concept that all humans can merge in a single moment, where no one is separated from the others and all become a single entity, which is the web.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 44

Way, Communication, Reality

“Consciousness, thoughts, are traveling through space in your head; we are traveling through space on this beautiful biosphere, Earth. If consciousness can traverse inner space, then perhaps it can traverse outer space. Perhaps we are as connected by consciousness as we are by the air that we all breathe. The air we inhale through the holes in our faces which tumbles into our lungs and blood, which travels through our hearts, which forms the words we speak, the air which we exhale, which is connected to all air, an unbroken entity, like all the water in all the rivers in the world, leading to the sea, touching one another.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

World, Beauty, Travel, Water

“The grand design of nature perceived broadly in four dimensions, including the forces that move the universe and created man, with special focus on evolution in our own biosphere, is something intrinsically good that it is right to preserve and enhance, and wrong to destroy and degrade.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

Source: Science and the Problem of Values (1972), p. 127

Nature, Universe

“Humanity faces the most complex task of its history so far. Stated in a solution-oriented way, it is necessary gradually to reorganize this planet at two levels. One must deal with the competing necessities of biosphere and mankind with all their environmental and climatic consequences. On the other level, it is necessary to resolve the demands of competing nations and worlds within mankind's hierarchy of socioeconomic developmental levels and the "Christmas tree" of sociopolitical, ideological, and military consequences.”

Krafft Arnold Ehricke (1917–1984) German aerospace engineer

The Extraterrestrial Imperative (1978)

World, Way, History, Tree

“"Saving the biosphere" depends first and foremost on human beings reaching mutual understanding and unforced agreement as to common ends. And that intersubjective accord occurs only in the noosphere. Anything short of that noospheric accord will continue to destroy the biosphere.”

Ken Wilber book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995, 2000)

Understanding, Dependency

“If the earth is millions of years old, why don’t we have a fifty thousand year old Bristle Cone Pine tree someplace or a half a million year old? The age of the oldest living thing in the biosphere, the Bristle Cone Pine, indicates a young age for the earth. The evolutionists don’t look at that one because that doesn’t support their theory.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

Age, Support, Tree

“I believe that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness-raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Quote of Joseph Beuys (1982), as cited in: Land and environmental art, Jeffrey Kastner, ‎Brian Wallis (1998), p. 164 - about his 7.000 Oaks [see there the image].
1980's

“The strange thing about the theory of evolution is that everyone thinks he understands it. But we do not. A biosphere, or an econosphere, self-consistently coconstructs itself according to principles we do not yet fathom.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

Attributed to Kauffman in: Jared Lobdell (2004) This Strange Illness: Alcholism and Bill W.. p.123

Understanding, Thinking

“The underlying reason for convergence seems to be that all organisms are under constant scrutiny of natural selection and are also subject to the constraints of the physical and chemical factors that severely limit the action of all inhabitants of the biosphere. Put simply, convergence shows that in a real world not all things are possible.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 202.

World, Nature

“We are seeking for another basic outlook - the world as organization. This would profoundly change the categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes. We must envision the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive interdependencies.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: 1960s, Robots, Men and Minds (1967), p. 57

World, Thinking, Change

“The immediate source of ecological crisis is capitalism… Capitalism is a cancer in the biosphere… I believe the color of radicalism today is not red, but green.”

Steve Chase American activist

Steve Chase, ed., Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman(Boston South End Press, 1991, p 57-59); O'Leary, Richard. Environmental mafia: the enemy is us. pp. 41

Color

“Evolution may not “drive” toward humanoid qualities at all, even if it uses them under rather special circumstances. What evolution may be up to could be merely the continuing structuration of the biosphere through increased levels of communication between systems of one level, resulting in more integrated supersystems on the next.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 86.

Communication

“Life is bacterial and those organisms that are not bacteria have evolved from organisms that were. …Gene exchanges were indispensable to those that would rid themselves of environmental toxins. …Replicating gene-carrying plasmids owned by the biosphere at large, when borrowed and returned by bacterial metabolic geniuses, alleviated most local environmental dangers, provided said plasmids could temporarily be incorporated into the cells of the threatened bacteria. The tiny bodies of the planetary patina spread to every reach, all microbes reproducing too rapidly for all offspring to survive in any finite universe. Undercover and unwitnessed, life back then was the prodigious progeny of bacteria. It still is.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

What is Life? (1995)

Life, Universe

“Think of all our knowledge-generating processes, our whole culture and civilization, and all the thought processes in the minds of every individual, and indeed the entire evolving biosphere as well, as being a gigantic computation. The whole thing is executing a self-motivated, self-generating computer program. More specifically it is, as I have mentioned, a virtual-reality program in the process of rendering, with ever-increasing accuracy, the whole of existence.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

The Fabric of Reality (1997)

Motivation, Knowledge, Thinking, Reality

“Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible. This competition is the major selective force in the memosphere, and, just as in the biosphere, the challenge has been met with great ingenuity. For instance, whatever virtues (from our perspective) the following memes have, they have in common the property of having phenotypic expressions that tend to make their own replication more likely by disabling or preempting the environmental forces that would tend to extinguish them: the meme for faith, which discourages the exercise of the sort of critical judgment that might decide that the idea of faith was, all things considered a dangerous idea; the meme for tolerance or free speech; the meme of including in a chain letter a warning about the terrible fates of those who have broken the chain in the past; the conspiracy theory meme, which has a built-in response to the objection that there is no good evidence of a conspiracy: "Of course not — that's how powerful the conspiracy is!" Some of these memes are "good" perhaps and others "bad"; what they have in common is a phenotypic effect that systematically tends to disable the selective forces arrayed against them. Other things being equal, population memetics predicts that conspiracy theory memes will persist quite independently of their truth, and the meme for faith is apt to secure its own survival, and that of the religious memes that ride piggyback on it, in even the most rationalistic environments. Indeed, the meme for faith exhibits frequency-dependent fitness: it flourishes best when it is outnumbered by rationalistic memes; in an environment with few skeptics, the meme for faith tends to fade from disuse.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

Fate, Truth, Faith, Exercises

“Intelligence is always connective. The biosphere works this way, through continuous contacts, catalysts, neurons which touch and activate other neurons. Today, this all has not only biological and chemical consistency, but a technological and teleinformatics one: it is not just a metaphor, or a "virtual" reality, but a real entity, a kind of emanation of the biosphere.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 138

Way, Intelligence, Reality

“It would be a triumph to find universal laws of organization for life, ecosystems, and biospheres. The candidate criticality law is emergent and not reducible to physics alone.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

Stuart A. Kauffman (2010) Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. p.40

Life, Law, Universe

“Space settlements would also contain biospheres replicating Earth conditions and atmosphere.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Source: Zero Gravity interview (2006), p. 75

“Instead the economy is a subsystem of the finite biosphere that supports it. When the economy’s expansion encroaches too much on the surrounding biosphere, we begin to sacrifice natural capital (animals, plants, minerals and fossil fuels) that is worth more than the manmade capital (roads, factories, appliances) added by ‘growth’.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

A steady-state economy, 2008

Support, Nature, Animals

“The time has passed when nations should be allowed to do as they individually wish with regard to global matters, each striving solely in its own interests, with the more powerful now able to destroy all humanity and more.
For the common good, we need to frame and abide by a higher system of law and justice, designed with less national, more godlike, perspectives for the preservation and welfare of the biosphere as a whole.
The problems of setting up and administering an effective, international force of this kind can hardly be more grave, formidable or insoluble than those we encounter on any alternative course.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

Toward a Higher System of World Law and Justice (1986)

Justice, Law, Problem, Time

“We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979)

Life, Optimism

“Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree.”

Murray Gell-Mann (1929–2019) American physicist

Murray Gell-Mann in ISSS The Primer Project http://www.newciv.org/ISSS_Primer/seminar.html International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS) seminar (12 October - 10 November 1997). <br class="br">Context: Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behaviour of the whole.

“Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

A Sketch of a Personalistic Universe (1936)
Context: There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. … Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken. For in fact, pure spirituality is as unconceivable as pure materiality. Just as, in a sense, there is no geometrical point, but as many structurally different points as there are methods of deriving them from different figures, so every spirit derives its reality and nature from a particular type of universal synthesis.

“The history and the geographical distribution of the myth are uncertain, but for several thousand years we have been obsessed with a false humility—on the one hand, putting ourselves down as mere "creatures" who came into this world by the whim of God or the fluke of blind forces, and on the other, conceiving ourselves as separate personal egos fighting to control the physical world. We have lacked the real humility of recognizing that we are members of the biosphere, the "harmony of contained conflicts" in which we cannot exist at all without the cooperation of plants, insects, fish, cattle, and bacteria. In the same measure, we have lacked the proper self-respect of recognizing that I, the individual organism, am a structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being. In the act of putting everything at a distance so as to describe and control it, we have orphaned ourselves both from the surrounding world and from our own bodies—leaving "I" as a discontented and alienated spook, anxious, guilty, unrelated, and alone.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 78

God, World, History, Fish