Quotes about ecosystem (52 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The importance of oaks both in the economy and in the forest ecosystem is big, but the exceptional part is that this tree plays in the old beliefs and legends.”

Marek Żukow-Karczewski (1961) Polish historian, journalist and opinion journalist

Oak - the king of the Polish trees, "Aura" 9, 1988-09, p. 20-21. http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.agro-72dccf88-5430-4d92-8617-9f550865d9b9?q=1dac2329-67be-4b51-b5b3-4554b1ebe953$15&qt=IN_PAGE

Tree , Parting

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation.”

Gus Speth

Quoted by Daniel crockett
Source: [Crockett, Daniel, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/daniel-crockett/nature-connection-will-be-the-next-big-human-trend_b_5698267.html/Nature, Connection Will Be the Next Big Human Trend, Huffington Post, Aug 22, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20160105052014/http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/daniel-crockett/nature-connection-will-be-the-next-big-human-trend_b_5698267.html, January 5, 2016, yes]

Selfishness , Loss , Problem , Thinking

“Although no conclusive proof exists that GM cereals may be harmful to human beings, and in some regions their use has brought about economic growth which has helped to resolve problems, there remain a number of significant difficulties which should not be underestimated. In many places, following the introduction of these crops, productive land is concentrated in the hands of a few owners due to “the progressive disappearance of small producers, who, as a consequence of the loss of the exploited lands, are obliged to withdraw from direct production”. The most vulnerable of these become temporary labourers, and many rural workers end up moving to poverty-stricken urban areas. The expansion of these crops has the effect of destroying the complex network of ecosystems, diminishing the diversity of production and affecting regional economies, now and in the future. In various countries, we see an expansion of oligopolies for the production of cereals and other products needed for their cultivation. This dependency would be aggravated were the production of infertile seeds to be considered; the effect would be to force farmers to purchase them from larger producers.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

§ 134
2010s, 2015, Laudato si' : Care for Our Common Home

Problem , Loss , Future , Help

“There is no self-awareness in ecosystems, no language, no consciousness, and no culture; and therefore no justice and democracy; but also no greed or dishonesty.”

Fritjof Capra (1939) American physicist

Epilogue: Ecological Literacy
The Web of Life (1996)

Justice , Democracy

“People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”

Greta Thunberg (2003) Swedish climate change activist

If world leaders choose to fail us, my generation will never forgive them https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/23/world-leaders-generation-climate-breakdown-greta-thunberg (23 September 2019), from speech delivered at the UN Climate Action Summit.
2019

Money , Fairytale , People

“I stand by my assertions that although you can know what happens to any individual species that you modify, you cannot be certain what will happen to the ecosystem. Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat people. It’s not that we need more food. It’s that we need to manage our food system better. So when corporations seek government funding for genetic modification of food sources, I stroke my chin.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NOTE: This position was retracted by Bill Nye less than four months later, per The Washington Post source March 3, 2015, below.]
Bill Nye Explains Why he is a GMO Skeptic, Discover Magazine, October 15, 2015, November 6, 2014, Keith, Kloor http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/11/06/bill-nye-explains-gmo-skeptic,

People , Food

“A culture is like the upright strands that you begin with in basket-making, round which you wind the texture of the basket itself: no sticks, no basket; no culture, no community. It is the grammar, the story, humour and good faith that identifies a community and gives it existence. It is both the parent and child of social capital. And the social capital of a community is its social life – the links of cooperation and friendship between its members. It is the common culture and ceremony, the good faith and reciprocal obligations the civility and citizenship, the play, humour and conversation which make a living community, the cooperation that builds its institutions. It is the social ecosystem in which a culture lives.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Lean Logic, (2016), p. xxi, introduction http://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/lean-logic-surviving-the-future/

Life , Friendship , Faith , Communication

“The ever-increasing cattle population is wreaking havoc on the earth's ecosystems, destroying habitats on six continents. Cattle raising is a primary factor in the destruction of the world's remaining tropical rain forests. … Cattle are also a major cause of global warming. … The devastating environmental, economic, and human toll of maintaining a worldwide cattle complex is little discussed in public policy circles. … Yet, cattle production and beef consumption now rank among the gravest threats to the future well-being of the earth and its human population.”

Jeremy Rifkin book Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture

Source: Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (1992), pp. 1-2

World , Future

“In calling society an ecological system we are not merely using an analogy; society is an example of the general concept of an "ecosystem" that is, an ecological system of which biological systems--forests, fields, swamps--are other examples.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1950s, A Reconstruction of Economics, 1950, p. 6

“An ecosystem is more like a conference than a community -- indefinite, pluralistic, tolerant, and in constant flux.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Communication

“We are the only ones who can harness the power of software and deliver it through devices and services that truly empower every individual and every organization. We are the only company with history and continued focus in building platforms and ecosystems that create broad opportunity.”

Satya Nadella (1967) CEO of Microsoft appointed on 4 February 2014

Meet the new CEO: Satya Nadella's email to Microsoft employees http://infoworld.com/d/the-industry-standard/meet-the-new-ceo-satya-nadellas-email-microsoft-employees-235678 in InfoWorld (4 February 2014)

History

“The nice thing about an -ism, someone once observed, is how quickly it becomes a wasm. Some musical wasms—academic-wasm, for example, and its dependent varieties of modern-wasm and Serial-wasm—continue to linger on artifical life support, thought, and continue to threaten the increasingly fragile classical ecosystem.”

Richard Taruskin (1945) American writer

New York Times, March 10, 1996. Quoted in Ashby, Arved, ed. (2004). The Pleasure of Modernist Music. ISBN 1580461433.

Life , Music , Support , Dependency

“Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it — at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

"The PC Era Is Just Beginning" in Business Week (22 March 2005) http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2005/tc20050322_7219.htm
2000s

People , Personality

“The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans. Our challenge for the future is that we realize we are very much a part of the earth's ecosystem, and we must learn to respect and live according to the basic biological laws of nature.”

Jim Fowler (1930–2019) American zoologist

http://www.gcci.org/awe/ema_award1198.html

Life , Law , Nature , Learning

“digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud
- PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, …
- Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator's dilemma)
- Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven't quite figured it out yet
- tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

email sent to his managers staff in 2010, which went public during trial against Samsung http://fr.scribd.com/doc/216405190/Apple-outline?_ga=1.21582200.27979217.1396947917
2010s

Universe

“Also, we need to give importance to value systems to promote innovation. We need to develop an ecosystem of innovation and technology will arrive soon. Of the 140 nations rated for innovation, India stood at a lowly 66. We need new ways of doing things and new ways of thinking. We cannot be doing the same things. Jugaad (a temporary solution) is one of them. The atmosphere itself should encourage innovation.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Quoted in "We need to have an instinct for self-preservation: C N R Rao".

Way , Thinking

“The total turtle count - two hundred and thirty species - doesn't seem like an irresistible horde compared to the several thousand mammals in today's global ecosystem. However, turtles have scored quite an impressive ecological triumph in one very important role, that of freshwater predator-omnivore… All through the Temperate Zone, otters delight the naturalist and the lay public. But how many other freshwater, semi-aquatic mammal predators can you name? Mink, of course. Relatives of otters on one hand, land weasels on the other, mink do hunt in streams. How many others? If you caught the excellent BBC series "Life on Earth", you saw footage of the swimming shrew, the Desman of the Pyrenees, a molelike furball that dives for aquatic worms and other freshwater small fry. Our own New England star-nosed mole goes hunting in water, using its starburst-shaped snout tip to feel out wriggling prey. Andean streams flowing through Preu are host to the fish-spearing mouse, Ichthyomys, that impales prey on its projecting front teeth. But if we go to a tropical lake or sluggish river, is it full of otters, mink, and paddling shrews? No, it is full of turtles.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 57
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life , Feeling , Star , Fish

“We're now in the midst of a 3rd World War, but this time the enemy is ourselves, and the objective is to save the planet FROM ourselves. There's no hope for masses of humanity to do anything — they never have, they never will. All social change comes from the passion and intervention of individuals or small groups of individuals. Slavery wasn't ended by any government or any institution. Women got the right to vote not because of any government. The civil rights movement, the same thing. India with Mahatma Gandhi, South Africa with Nelson Mandela. Again, it's always individuals. You need those individuals with the passion and the energy to get involved. In fact, I don't know of any government or any institutions that are doing anything to solve any of these problems. All over the world, all I am seeing is individuals and non-government organizations that are passionately involved in protecting ecosystems and species, and that's where I see some optimism. That's where I see results are happening.”

Paul Watson (1950) Canadian environmental activist

"Sharkwater" documentary

Women , War , World , Hope

“Ecology, as it is currently practiced, sometimes deals with human impacts on ecosystems, but the more common tendency is to stick to 'natural' systems.”

Robert Costanza (1950) American economist

Robert Costanza and Janis King. "The first decade of ecological economics." Ecological Economics 28.1 (1999): 1-9.

Nature

“A healthy ocean is an ocean with sharks. Take away an apex predator and it’s like removing the lions from the Serengeti. It won’t be long before the gazelle, zebras and wildebeest have multiplied and eaten all the grass. And when the land is laid bare the grazers will starve to death. Predators are crucial for a healthy ecosystem – be it on land or in the water.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

24 September 2014, Op-ed in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/opinion/swimming-through-garbage.html?_r=0
Speaking & Features

Death , Grass , Water

“If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life. Not only did dinosaurs exercise an airtight monopoly as large land animals, they kept their commanding position for an extraordinary span of time - 130 million years. Our own human species is no more than a hundred thousand years old. And our own zoological class, the Mammalia, the clan of of warm-blooded furry creatures, has ruled the land ecosystem for only seventy million years. True, the dinosaurs are extinct, but we ought to be careful in judging them inferior to our own kind. Who can say that the human system will last another thousand years, let alone a hundred million? Who can predict that our Class Mammalia will rule for another hundred thousand millennia?”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 16
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life , Exercises , History , Time

“Biotech companies spread patented genetic sequences via the natural ecosystem—much like a computer virus. Then they use the legal system to claim ownership of any organism their patented genetic sequences invade. They are raiding communal seed banks, obtaining patents for naturally occurring apples, sugar beets, corn, and a host of other plants and animals. They have immorally seized control of the food system and stand poised to claim ownership of life itself unless we take action.”

Daniel Suarez book Freedom™

Source: Freedom™ (2010), Chapter 9: Seed Police

Life , Food , Communication , Nature

“The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007)

People , Bird

“In the south west of India lies the long narrow coastal state of Kerala. Most of its thirty-two million inhabitants live off the land and the ocean, a rich tropical ecosystem watered by two monsoons a year. It's also one of India's most crowded states - but the population is stable because nearly everybody has small families… At the root of it all is education. Thanks to a long tradition of compulsory schooling for boys and girls Kerala has one of the highest literacy rates in the World. Where women are well educated they tend to choose to have smaller families… What Kerala shows is that you don't need aggressive policies or government incentives for birthrates to fall. Everywhere in the world where women have access to education and have the freedom to run their own lives, on the whole they and their partners have been choosing to have smaller families than their parents. But reducing birthrates is very difficult to achieve without a simple piece of medical technology, contraception. m35s09-m38s21”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Women , World , Education , School

“As the natural systems of the planet broke down, humans would discover conclusively that they were still, after all, just animals in an ecosystem; and as it died back, so did they.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section II (p. 525)

Nature , Animals

“The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the earth.
But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here.
Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interaction of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness.
I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this.
So my question is—consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (pp. 509-510)

Life , People , World , Way

“There are several generations of Silicon Valley CEOs who "pay-it-forward." It’s an understood, underground thing you don’t talk about. You give back to younger founders and entrepreneurs without asking for anything. The goal is to pass on what we learned to make our startup ecosystem better.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Interview with Steve Blank (2013)

Learning

“The secrecy hasn't been enforced because the government thinks people are going to freak out when they find we're not alone in the universe, not in 1999. What will be shocking is the scandal of the last 50 years of ecosystem destruction, when we've had the technology to avoid it since the late '50s.”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

Undated

People , Thinking , Universe

“While Apple's attempt to control the ecosystem and maintain a closed platform may be good for Apple, developers want more options and customers want to fully access the overwhelming majority of Web sites that use Flash. We think many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple. … even people inside the distortion field [at Apple] will begin to resent being told half a story.”

Jim Balsillie (1961) Canadian businessman

RIM's Balsillie Slams Jobs, Says Users Are 'Tired' of Apple http://pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371119,00.asp in PC Magazine (19 October 2010)

People , Thinking

“Many humans look at nature from an aesthetic perspective and think in terms of biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, but forget that the animals that inhabit these ecosystems are individuals and have their own needs. Disease, starvation, predation, ostracism, and sexual frustration are endemic in so-called healthy ecosystems. The great taboo in the animal rights movement is that most suffering is due to natural causes. Any proposal for remedying this situation is bound to sound utopian, but my dream is that one day the sun will rise on Earth and all sentient creatures will greet the new day with joy.”

Nick Bostrom (1973) Swedish philosopher

Albert, a fictional dog in Golden https://nickbostrom.com/fable/retriever.html (2004)

Health , Disease , Dreams , Nature

“Apple fans should be scared to death … Apple is fighting a very similar war to the one it fought — and lost — in the 1990s. It is trying to build the best integrated products, hardware and software, and maintain complete control over the ecosystem around them. This end-to-end control makes it easier for Apple to build products that are 'better,' but it makes it much harder for the company to compete against a software platform that is standard across many hardware manufacturers”

Henry Blodget (1966) American equity research analyst

Windows in the 1990s, Android now
Android Is Destroying Everyone, Especially RIM — iPhone Dead In Water http://www.businessinsider.com/android-iphone-market-share-2011-4 in Business Insider (2 April 2011)

Death , War , Fight

“Symbioses are central in the evolution of complexity; have evolved many times and are critical to the lifestyles of many animals and plants and also to whole ecosystems, in which symbiotic organisms are key players. The primary reason that symbiosis research is suddenly active, after decades at the margins of mainstream biology, is that DNA technology and genomics give us enormous new ability to discover symbiont diversity, and more significantly, to reveal how microbial metabolic capabilities contribute to the functioning of hosts and biological communities.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[Nancy A. Moran, Election Year: 2004, Member Directory, National Academy of Sciences, http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/2538196.html]

Communication , Time , Animals

“How did an entire ecosystem develop around dungeon exploration?”

Mark Rosenfelder American language inventor

About Dungeons and Dragons creatures http://zompist.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/monster-mash-up/

“I was born in the heart of the Great American Food Machine. From childhood on it was expected that I would someday take over and run what has become the world's largest ice cream company—Baskin-Robbins. Year after year I was groomed and prepared for the task, given an opportunity to live the Great American Dream… There is a sweeter and deeper American dream than the one I turned down. It is the dream of a success in which all beings share because it is founded on a reverence for life. A dream of a society at peace with its conscience because it respects and lives in harmony with all life forms. A dream of a people living in accord with the laws of Creation, cherishing and caring for the natural environment, conserving nature instead of destroying it. A dream of a society that is truly healthy, practicing a wise and compassionate stewardship of a balanced ecosystem.”

John Robbins book Diet for a New America

Introduction
Diet for a New America (1987)

Life , People , World , Peace

“Ecosocial Dynamics concerns ecosocial systems and networks, i. e. those ecosystems, including all material components, for which semiotic practices are essential to characterizing the dynamics of the material processes which constitute the system through their networks of mutual interdependencies.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Jay Lemke. " Ecosocial Dynamics http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/ecosoc.htm," at academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu, Accessed 03. 2017.

“Ecological Economics studies the ecology of humans and the economy of nature, the web of interconnections uniting the economic subsystem to the global ecosystem of which it is a part.”

Robert Costanza (1950) American economist

Robert Costanza, Ecological economics: the science and management of sustainability. Columbia University Press, 1992.

Nature , Study , Parting

“The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge. It recognizes aesthetic, moral, and religious ideas and experiences as a species, in this case of mental structures or of images, which clearly interacts with other species in the world's great' ecosystem.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 20

World , Idea , Knowledge , Universe

“If we and the rest of the backboned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if they were to disappear, the land's ecosystems would collapse. The soil would lose its fertility. Many of the plants would no longer be pollinated. Lots of animals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals would have nothing to eat. And our fields and pastures would be covered with dung and carrion. These small creatures are within a few inches of our feet, wherever we go on land – but often, they're disregarded. We would do very well to remember them.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
Life in the Undergrowth (2005)

World , Bird , Animals

“If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)… Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.”

Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) American libertarian socialist author, orator, and philosopher

Page 26 of the 1991 reprint
The Ecology of Freedom (1982)

Food , Thinking , Animals

“I'm very aware that this programme may be regarded as bleak or depressing - an increasing population with an ever decreasing supply of resources – but humans have capabilities that animals don't: to think rationally; to study; to plan ahead. The number of people on the planet depends on the personal decisions we each make regarding the number of children we have even setting aside the moral responsibility we have to protect other species, if we continue to damage our ecosystem, we damage ourselves. Its clear that we'll have to change the way that we live and use our resources. We're at a crossroads where we can chose to cooperate or carry on regardless. Can our intelligence save us? I hope so. m46s24-m47s15”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Children , People , Hope , Way

“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

“Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem. Today it stands on the verge of becoming a god, poised to acquire not only eternal youth, but also the divine abilities of creation and destruction.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

God , Youth , Business , Animals

“Human communities are ecosystems. Ecosystems are biological, chemical and physical systems. The physics, chemistry and biology of complex self-organizing systems can tell us much that is useful about human communities: about the conditions necessary for the existence of human communities, about the properties human communities 'inherit' because they are special cases of more general kinds of systems, particularly ecosystems.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics, 1995, p. 159

Communication

“Plants and plant-eaters co-evolved. And plants aren't the passive partners in the chain of terrestrial life. Hence today's Pop Ecology movement is quite wrong in believing that plants are happy to fill their role as fodder for herbivores in a harmonious and perfectly balanced ecosystem. A birch tree doesn't feel cosmic fulfillment when a moose munches its leaves; the tree species, in fact, evolves to fight the moose, to keep the animal's munching lips away from vulnerable young leaves and twigs. In the final analysis, the merciless hand of natural selection will favor the birch genes that make the tree less and less palatable to the moose in generation after generation. No plant species could survive for long by offering itself as unprotected fodder.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 179
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life , Feeling , Nature , Tree

“Capitalism imposes its laws of motion on the environment, irrespective of the biogeochemical cycles of the planet and the earth’s metabolism, so that it creates rifts or ruptures in the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system, disrupting ecosystem relations in ways that transcend the mere scale-effects of economic growth. It is this problem of the metabolic rift that is our deepest challenge. Sustainability is more and more compromised at ever higher levels—a continually accelerating threat to civilization and life itself.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Interview with Left Voice (2017)

Life , Law , Way , Problem

“It would be quite false to say that competition is the only relation that obtains between species. Mutual dependence is in general quite as important. Each kind exists within an ecosystem, and needs the others to keep the system going. Thus, grazing animals on the African plains co-exist because each specializes in eating some particular kind of plant, and needs the others to keep the whole pasture at a balanced level. They depend, too, on each other's specialized capacities to give warning of danger. … each also depends for survival on innumerable others, such as the insects which pollinate the plants, the fauna of their intestines and of course their predators. It is unthinkable that any species should be an island.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Animals and Why They Matter (1983), ch. 2, 3.

Animals , Dependency , Falseness

“Protecting elephants and conserving natural ecosystems remain my personal priorities. But I am not so sure this would be so were I ill, hungry, and living in dispair. …We must somehow find a way to provide for our own species if we are also to preserve others.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures (2001) with Virginia Morell

Way , Nature , Personality

“If we are to prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect of human culture, we shall be able to do so only with the aid of a radically different model derived directly, not from machines, but from living organisms and organic complexes (ecosystems).”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)
Context: If we are to prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect of human culture, we shall be able to do so only with the aid of a radically different model derived directly, not from machines, but from living organisms and organic complexes (ecosystems). What can be known about life only through the process of living — and so is part of even the humblest organisms — must be added to all the other aspects that can be observed, abstracted, measured. … Once an organic world picture is in the ascendant, the working aim of an economy of plenitude will be not to feed more human functions into the machine, but to develop further man's incalculable potentialities for self-actualization and self-transendence, taking back into himself deliberately many of the activities he has too supinely surrendered into the mechanical system. <!-- p. 395

“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation.”

James Gustave Speth (1942) American environmental lawyer and advocate

[Crockett, Daniel, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/daniel-crockett/nature-connection-will-be-the-next-big-human-trend_b_5698267.html/Nature, Connection Will Be the Next Big Human Trend, Huffington Post, Aug 22, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20160105052014/http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/daniel-crockett/nature-connection-will-be-the-next-big-human-trend_b_5698267.html, January 5, 2016, yes]

Selfishness , Loss , Problem , Thinking

“So we've got to figure out what the ecosystem is going to be, to develop vaccines that are not going to make money.”

Peter Hotez (1958) American academic

House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Hearing on Coronavirus (March 5, 2020)

Money , Making love

“Our globalised world finds itself caught on the horns of a seemingly impossible dilemma – either cease growing, and so collapse the economy on which we all depend, or continue to grow until we overwhelm and destroy the ecosystems on which we all depend.”

Shaun Chamberlin

"The Sequel: Life After Economic Growth", Tikkun (2018) https://www.tikkun.org/the-sequel-life-after-economic-growth

World , Dependency

“That’s what I think they’re doing, eating themselves alive. They murder in the name of God and blindly destroy the very ecosystem that sustains them.”

Arthur C. Clarke book Richter 10

“People are people.” Bert shrugged.
“What you’re really saying is that people are animals,” Crane replied. “And I say to you, it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make a civilization, a real civilization, built on real understanding of ourselves and our universe.”
Source: 1990s, Richter 10 (1996), Chapter 20, “Shimani-Gashi” (p. 362)

God , Thinking