Ecological Quotes - Page 8

• A sense of being part of the great all-inclusive life prompts us to reflect on our own place and on how we ought to live. Guarding others' lives, the ecology and the earth is the same as protecting one's own life. By like token, wounding them is the same thing as wounding oneself. Consequently, it is the duty of each of us to participate as members of the life community in the evolution of the universe. We can do this by guarding earth's ecological system.

  Daisaku Ikeda

  Community, Earth, Guarding

  4 Copy quote

• Our lack of community is intensely painful. A TV talk show is not community. A couple of hours in a church pew each Sabbath is not community. A multinational corporation is neither a human nor a community, and in the sweatshops, defiled agribusiness fields, genetic mutation labs, ecological dead zones, the inhumanity is showing. Without genuine spiritual community, life becomes a struggle so lonely and grim that even Hillary Clinton has admitted "it takes a village".

  David James Duncan

  Spiritual, Lonely, Couple

  David James Duncan (2007). “God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right”, p.99, Triad Institute, Inc.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

  Aldo Leopold

  Rivers, Environmental, World

  Aldo Leopold (1972). “Round River”, p.119, Oxford University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• What the new fertilizer technology has accomplished for the farmer is clear: more crop can be produced on less acreage than before. Since the cost of fertilizer, relative to the resultant gain in crop sales, is lower than that of any other economic input, and since the Land Bank pays the farmer for acreage not in crops, the new technology pays him well. The cost-in environmental degradation-is borne by his neighbors in town who find their water polluted. The new technology is an economic success-but only because it is an ecological failure.

  Barry Commoner

  Technology, Land, Water

  13 Copy quote

• . . . the upsurge of Spirit is the only plausible way to stop the ecological destruction of our planet. Even people who have no interest in a communal solution to the distortions in our lives will have to face up [to] this ecological reality. Unless we transform our relationship with nature, we will destroy the preconditions for human life on this planet.

  Michael Lerner

  Reality, People, Way

  Michael Lerner (2000). “Spirit Matters”, Hampton Roads Publishing Company Incorporated

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren't enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Cutting, Ebola, People

  28 Copy quote

• Almost all major scientific projects today are huge collaborations, yet we still have this public obsession with the idea of the individual scientific genius. One of my goals as a science communicator is to celebrate the collaborative dimensions of science, which I think will be critical for facing the ecological and resource challenges ahead. In a sense, we are all corals now.

  Margaret Wertheim

  Thinking, Goal, Challenges

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Flying has changed how we imagine our planet, which we have seen whole from space, so that even the farthest nations are ecological neighbors. It has changed our ideas about time. When you can gird the earth at 1,000 m.p.h., how can you endure the tardiness of a plumber? Most of all, flying has changed our sense of our body, the personal space in which we live, now elastic and swift. I could be in Bombay for afternoon tea if I wished. My body isn't limited by its own weaknesses; it can rush through space.

  Diane Ackerman

  Ideas, Space, Flying

  7 Copy quote

• A recent review of different agricultural options for the future was conducted by a panel of experts. The scientists posed the question: How are we going to feed the world when there are nine billion people on it, as there will be by 2050? And the answer they came up with was industrial agriculture won't work and genetic engineering won't work and the solution is going to be sustainable, and going to ecological kinds of farming that are based on local environmental conditions that work with local ecosystems available to develop a richer kind of farming technology.

  Raj Patel

  Technology, People, Environmental

  8 Copy quote

• Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's "King Solomon's Ring," I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject.

  Allan McLeod Cormack

  Kings, Reading, Science

  52 Copy quote

• Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.

  Charles Eisenstein

  Earth, Financial, Ecological Crisis

  Charles Eisenstein (2011). “Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition”, p.127, North Atlantic Books

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.

  Grace Lee Boggs

  Spiritual, Sea, People

  262 Copy quote

• I wouldn’t want to be labelled unless it was something much broader and inclusive such as an ecological artist or a visionary artist, but there’s a constraint in the definition of a feminist artist, you’re an artist and you’re a feminist.

  Carolee Schneemann

  Artist, Feminist, Visionaries

  17 Copy quote

• I learned that [Trotskyism] were no different from the Stalinists, and they expelled me, which is the typical Marxist-Leninist way of dealing with dissenters. From that point on, I migrated by the 1950s into anarchism, increasingly emphasizing decentralization. Also, I made the all-important step of bridging my social philosophy with ecology. I did that in 1952 and went on to write a whole series of books developing an anarcho-ecological approach.

  Murray Bookchin

  Philosophy, Book, Writing

  4 Copy quote

• My greatest hope is that we transcend the most fearful thing, which is that we are rapidly degrading the ecological systems on this planet that support everything we are doing and all life on it.

  Edward Norton

  Support, Planets, Degrading

  Interview with Bennett Miller, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 3, 2014.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• We do not have an ecological crisis. The ecosphere has a human crisis. Our 'story' about our place in the scheme of things has somehow gone awry in the industrial age.

  William E. Rees

  Age, Gone, Stories

  7 Copy quote

• A land ethic...reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in
  turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.
  Health is the capacity of the land for self-renewal. Conservation is our effort
  to understand and preserve this capacity.

  Aldo Leopold

  Responsibility, Self, Land

  8 Copy quote

• It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.

  Barbara Ehrenreich

  Numbers, Paper, Earth

  Barbara Ehrenreich (1990). “WORST YEARS OF OUR LIVES”, Pantheon

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Humans are now the most numerous mammal on the planet. There are more humans than rats or mice. Humans have a huge ecological footprint, magnified by their technology.

  David Suzuki

  Technology, Environmental, Mammals

  11 Copy quote

• Although two thirds of our planet is water, we face an acute water shortage. The water crisis is the most pervasive , most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth.

  Vandana Shiva

  Two, Water, Earth

  Vandana Shiva (2002). “Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit”, p.1, Pluto Press

  26 Copy quote

  Show source

• I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Thinking, Bird, Want

  4 Copy quote

• The role of geo-engineering should, in a world of responsibility, in a world of scientifically enlightened decision making and ecological understanding, it should be zero. There is no role for geo-engeneering. Because what is geoengineering but extending the engineering paradigm?

  Vandana Shiva

  Zero, Responsibility, Engineering

  Source: www.nogeoingegneria.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• In America, we need to develop communitywide structures of democratic ownership, we need to work out cooperative development, we need to work out participatory management, we need new ecological strategies developed at the local city, state, regional level.

  Gar Alperovitz

  Cities, America, Work Out

  Source: www.truth-out.org

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• We can pay the ecological debt by changing economic models, and by giving up luxury consumption, setting aside selfishness and individualism, and thinking about the people and the planet Earth.

  Evo Morales

  Giving Up, Thinking, Luxury

  13 Copy quote

• If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.

  Robert Bly

  Sibling, Whales, Years

  Source: www.utne.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source