Quotes about habitat

A collection of quotes on the topic of habitat, nature, species, human.

Quotes about habitat

Moshe Safdie photo

“When I got my first commission after Habitat, for a few weeks I couldn't draw.”

Moshe Safdie (1938) Israeli-Canadian architect

CBC television interview, used for many years in CBC Montreal's sign-on montage

Jordan Peterson photo

“The idea that paradise, the proper habitat of a human being, is a walled garden – is a good one. It's an echo back to the chaos/order idea. Walls: culture. Garden: nature. The proper human habitat is a properly tended garden.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

Agatha Christie photo
Sarah Dessen photo
Mohsin Hamid photo
David Levithan photo
Maggie Nelson photo
Starhawk photo
Jeremy Rifkin photo
Viktor Schauberger photo

“Wherever we look the dreadful disintegration of the bridges of life, the capillaries and the bodies they have created, is evident, which has been caused by the mechanical and mindless work of man, who has torn away the soul from the Earth's blood - water. The more the engineer endeavors to channel water, of whose spirit and nature he is today still ignorant, by the shortest and straightest route to the sea, the more the flow of water weighs into the bends, the longer its path and the worse the water will become. The spreading of the most terrible disease of all, of cancer, is the necessary consequence of such unnatural regulatory works. These mistaken activities - our work - must legitimately lead to increasingly widespread unemployment, because our present methods of working, which have a purely mechanical basis, are already destroying not only all of wise Nature's formative processes, but first and foremost the growth of the vegetation itself, which is being destroyed even as it grows. The drying up of mountain springs, the change in the whole pattern of motion of the groundwater, and the disturbance in the blood circulation of the organism - Earth - is the direct result of modern forestry practices. The pulse-beat of the Earth was factually arrested by the modern timber production industry. Every economic death of a people is always preceded by the death of its forests. The forest is the habitat of water and as such the habitat of life processes too, whose quality declines as the organic development of the forest is disturbed. Ultimately, due to a law which functions with awesome constancy, it will slowly but surely come around to our turn. Our accustomed way of thinking in many ways, and perhaps even without exception, is opposed to the true workings of Nature. Our work is the embodiment of our will. The spiritual manifestation of this work is its effect. When such work is carried out correctly, it brings happiness, but when carried out incorrectly, it assuredly brings misery.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger: Our Senseless Toil (1934)

Anu Garg photo

“The best way to enrich vocabulary is organically, by coming across words in their natural habitat, taking the time to learn about them, their histories, and making lifelong friends with them.”

Anu Garg (1967) Indian author

The Philomath Speaks An Interview with Anu Garg (Dec 15, 2009) http://www.nas.org/articles/The_Philomath_Speaks_An_Interview_with_Anu_Garg

Maneka Gandhi photo

“One problem is the destruction of the habitat, and the second is this constant catching of elephants for training, for tourism or logging. And this training that we are doing is the most brutal, primitive and stupid in the whole world.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

On captive elephants, as quoted in "Indian minister's elephant alert" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/780015.stm, BBC (6 June 2000)
1991-2000

Andrei Sakharov photo
Johannes Kepler photo

“The Earth sings Mi-Fa-Mi, so we can gather ever from this that Misery and Famine reign in our habitat.”

Book V, Ch. 6 as quoted in Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers (1959)
Harmonices Mundi (1618)

Edward O. Wilson photo
Tommy Lee Jones photo
William McDonough photo
Edward St. Aubyn photo
Andrei Codrescu photo
Gerard O'Neill photo
Gerald Durrell photo
Lewis Pugh photo
Jeremy Corbyn photo
Vanna Bonta photo
Ilana Mercer photo

“Infinite product spaces are the natural habitat of probability theory.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter V, Conditional Probability, Stochastic Independence, p. 130

Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Kenneth Minogue photo
Claude Lévi-Strauss photo
Albert Einstein photo

“Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"Only Then Shall We Find Courage", New York Times Magazine (23 June 1946).
1940s

Ilana Mercer photo
Nick Bostrom photo
David Attenborough photo
Brian W. Aldiss photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo
Jared Diamond photo

“In one of the myriad ways humans and coyotes eerily mimic each one another, like us coyotes are cosmopolitan species, able to live in a remarkable range of habitats.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

p, 125
Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

L. David Mech photo

“In the recent past, wolves were labeled a flagship species or an umbrella, indicator, or keystone species, depending on what conservation market one was trying to penetrate… A flagship species is an attraction to nearly all society's strata, but wolves are not welcomed by all factions of society. With a few rare exceptions, the rural world opposes wolves, so the animal's flagship role is restricted primarily to urbanites or to local areas. Wolves are certainly a powerful flagship species for the conservation movement, particularly that of affluent societies with strong lobbies in large cities, but a true flagship species should be able to move an entire society toward a goal.
Neither are wolves a good umbrella species (i. e., a species, usually high in the ecological pyramid, whose conservation necessarily fosters that of the rest of the chain) in that they can live well on a variety of food resources and in areas with an impoverished prey base. Wolves are not a keystone species either, in that they are not essential for the presence of many other species (e. g., herbivores flourish in areas devoid of wolves). And wolves are not necessarily indicators of good habitat quality or integrity because they are too generalist to be good indicators of the presence of a pristine trophic chain.
The above labels have been very useful in many circumstance and have contributed significantly to wolf recovery. They may still be useful in the future, but we should be aware that they are shortcuts to "sell a product" rather than good scientific grounds on which to build conservation.”

L. David Mech (1937) American Biologist , Ecologist

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation (2003)

Lewis Mumford photo
Gerald Durrell photo
P. J. O'Rourke photo
Freeman Dyson photo

“I have to clear away a few popular misconceptions about space as a habitat … It is generally considered that planets are important. Except for Earth, they are not.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

Part IV: Personal and Philosophical Essays, Ch. 24 : "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil" (1972)
The Scientist As Rebel (2006)
Context: I have to clear away a few popular misconceptions about space as a habitat … It is generally considered that planets are important. Except for Earth, they are not. Mars is waterless, and the others are, for various reasons, basically inhospitable to man. It is generally considered that beyond the sun’s family of planets there is absolute emptiness extending for light-years until you come to another star. In fact, it is likely that the space around the solar system is populated by huge numbers of comets, small worlds a few miles in diameter, rich in water and the other chemicals essential to life.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh photo

“Pollution is a direct outcome of man's ruthless exploitation of the earth's resources. Experience shows that the growth of successful organic populations is eventually balanced by the destruction of its own habitat. The vast man-made deserts show that the human population started this process long ago.”

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921) member of the British Royal Family, consort to Queen Elizabeth II

Edinburgh University Union (1969)
The Environmental Revolution: Speeches on Conservation, 1962–77 (1978)
Context: The sheer weight of numbers of the human population, our habitations, our machinery and our ruthless exploitation of the living and organic resources of the earth; together these are changing our whole environment. This is what we call progress and much of this development is naturally to the direct and welcome benefit of mankind. However, we cannot at the same time ignore the awkward consequences and the most direct and menacing, but not the only consequence of this change, is pollution... Pollution is a direct outcome of man's ruthless exploitation of the earth's resources. Experience shows that the growth of successful organic populations is eventually balanced by the destruction of its own habitat. The vast man-made deserts show that the human population started this process long ago. There are two important differences today. In the first place the process has gone from a walking pace to a breakneck gallop. Secondly we know exactly what is happening. If not exactly in all cases, we know enough to appreciate what is happening and the need to take care... Pollution is no longer a matter of local incidents, today it has the whole biosphere in its grip. The processes which devastated the Welsh valleys a hundred years ago are now at work, over, on and under the earth and the oceans. Even if we bury all this waste underground there still remains the risk that toxic materials through chemical reactions will be washed out and into underground water courses. If ever there was an area of research more closely related to human welfare it is the problem of the safe disposal of waste and effluents... The fact is that we have got to make a choice between human prosperity on the one hand and the total well-being of the planet Earth on the other. Even then it is hardly a choice because if we only look for human prosperity we shall certainly destroy by pollution the earth and the human population which has existed on it for millions of years... If the world pollution situation is not critical at the moment it is as certain as anything can be that the situation will become increasingly intolerable within a very short time. The situation can be controlled and even reversed but it demands co-operation on a scale and intensity beyond anything achieved so far... I realise that there are any number of vital causes to be fought for, I sympathise with people who work up a passionate concern about the all too many examples of inhumanity, injustice, and unfairness, but behind all this hangs a really deadly cloud. Still largely unnoticed and unrecognised, the process of destroying our natural environment is gathering speed and momentum. If we fail to cope with this challenge, all the other problems will pale into insignificance.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar photo
D.H. Lawrence photo
David Pearce (philosopher) photo

“It seems, moreover, that my argument has some relevance to choices we must make even now. There are some species of large predatory animals, such as the Siberian tiger, that are currently on the verge of extinction. If we do nothing to preserve it, the Siberian tiger as a species may soon become extinct. The number of extant Siberian tigers has been low for a considerable period. Any ecological disruption occasioned by their dwindling numbers has largely already occurred or is already occurring. If their number in the wild declines from several hundred to zero, the impact of their disappearance on the ecology of the region will be almost negligible. Suppose, however, that we could repopulate their former wide-ranging habitat with as many Siberian tigers as there were during the period in which they flourished in their greatest numbers, and that that population could be sustained indefinitely. That would mean that herbivorous animals in the extensive repopulated area would again, and for the indefinite future, live in fear and that an incalculable number would die in terror and agony while being devoured by a tiger. In a case such as this, we may actually face the kind of dilemma I called attention to in my article, in which there is a conflict between the value of preserving existing species and the value of preventing suffering and early death for an enormously large number of animals.”

Jeff McMahan (philosopher) (1954) American philosopher

" Predators: A Response https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/predators-a-response/", The New York Times, 28 Sept. 2010

Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“Contrary to what is usually thought, nationalism is a type of tribal-collectivism where individual identity is subjugated to a collective group identity, making it a perfect habitat for most species of socialism and fascism.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: Killing History: The False Left-Right Political Spectrum and the Battle between the ‘Free Left’ and the ‘Statist Left', (2019), p. 96

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson photo
Iain Banks photo

“In recent decades the effects of environmental change on insect populations has been the focus of my research. It is widely recognised that invasive alien species, climate change and habitat destruction are all major players in the declines of many insects. Ladybirds are no exception.”

Helen Roy (1969) British ecologist and entomologist

Source: Ladybirds: an interview with Helen Roy, Ecological Entomologist at the BRC https://www.nhbs.com/blog/ladybirds-helen-roy (14 May 2013)

Matt Gaetz photo

“Illegal aliens have destroyed some of the most critical monarch butterfly habitats in the world. I bet you didn’t know that.”

Matt Gaetz (1982) American politician and member of the United States House of Representatives

"Matt Gaetz’s Claim That Migrants Are Killing Monarch Butterflies Is Utter Bullsh*t" https://www.thedailybeast.com/matt-gaetzs-claim-that-migrants-are-killing-monarch-butterflies-is-utter-bullsht, The Daily Beast, 26 July 2022