Ecosystems Quotes - Page 8

• We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.

  Wendell Berry

  Community, Environmental, Sustainability

  Wendell Berry (2001). “Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition”, Counterpoint Press

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• We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation.

  Rowan Williams

  Eye, Animal, Vegetables

  Rowan Williams (2012). “Faith in the Public Square”, p.188, A&C Black

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• The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

  Wendell Berry

  Sacrifice, Community, Environmental

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

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• The nuclear peril is usually seen in isolation from the threats to other forms of life and their ecosystems, but in fact it should be seen at the very center of the ecological crisis, as the cloud-covered Everest of which the more immediate, visible kinds of harm to the environment are the mere foothills.

  Jonathan Schell

  Clouds, Environmental, Facts

  Jonathan Schell (2000). “The Fate of the Earth: And, The Abolition”, p.111, Stanford University Press

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• I am beginning to understand that the stream the scientists are studying is not just a little creek. It's a river of energy that moves across regions in great geographic cycles. Here, life and death are only different points on a continuum. The stream flows in a circle through time and space, turning death into life across coastal ecosystems, as it has for more than a million years. But such streams no longer flow in the places where most of us live.

  Kathleen Moore

  Moving, Space, Years

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• 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.

  Bill Nye

  People, Needs, Strange

  "Bill Nye Explains Why he is a GMO Skeptic" by Keith Kloor, blogs.discovermagazine.com. November 6, 2014.

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• You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.

  Aaron Levie

  Crazy, Want, Building

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• Look at any financial institution, at any bank. They're all photocopies of each other. There's no diversity of institutions and even less diversity of currency. Therefore, just as you say its very logical that an ecosystem like this will collapse, it's very predictable a monetary system like this will collapse, too. And it hasn't finished collapsing, by the way.

  Bernard Lietaer

  Diversity, Looks, Way

  Interview with Tracy Fernandez Rysavy, www.greenamerica.org. 2009.

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• The more people you run into, the greater your exposure, the easier it is to understand and empathize with other people. So if you are living in a much smaller ecosystem, it's probably easier to have simpler feelings.

  James Scott

  Running, People, Feelings

  "James Scott’s Violent Landscape". Interview with Royal Young, www.interviewmagazine.com. January 7, 2014.

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• The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche.

  Frank Herbert

  Niche, Realizing, Certain

  Frank Herbert (2003). “Dune”, p.427, Penguin

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• Most floods are caused by man, not weather; deforestation, levee construction, erosion, and overgrazing all result in the loss of ecosystem services.

  Paul Hawken

  Loss, Men, Erosion

  "Capital Gains". www.motherjones.com. March/April 1997.

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• Since nature has the most sustainable ecosystem and since ultimately agriculture comes out of nature, our standard for a sustainable world should be nature's own ecosystem.

  Wes Jackson

  Agriculture, World, Should

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• Leadership is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are part of a community, then leadership is everyone's vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.

  Parker J. Palmer

  Thinking, Self, Community

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• We should not be living in human communities that enclose tiny preserved ecosystems within them. Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities.

  Paul Watson

  Communication, People, Community

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• Through scientific discovery and technological innovation, we enlist the forces of the natural world to solve many of the uniquely human problems we face - feeding and providing energy to agrowing population, improving human health, taking responsibility for protecting the environment and the global ecosystem, and ensuring our own Nation's security. Scientific discoveries inspire and enrich us, teaching us about the mysteries of life and the nature of the world.

  William J. Clinton

  Teaching, Responsibility, Discovery

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• What they [psychedelics] cause is what I'm advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we're practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.

  Terence McKenna

  Pain, Animal, People

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• I run from Horatio Street down just past Battery Park City and back. It's amazing to run and see the Statue of Liberty and the ferries coming in. People think if you're not near Central Park, there's nowhere to go, but there's a whole ecosystem happening down here.

  Andy Cohen

  Running, Past, Thinking

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• It's the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change - as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

  Bill Gates

  People, Climate, Want

  "Q&A: Bill Gates on How to Stop Global Warming". Interview with Jeff Goodell, www.rollingstone.com. December 9, 2010.

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• The production of natural resources in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, stable natural hydrological cycles, fertile soils, a balanced climate and numerous other vital ecosystem services can only be permanently secured through the protection and sustainable use of biological diversity.

  Sigmar Gabriel

  Agriculture, Diversity, Climate

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• It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.

  Gary Hamel

  Educational, What Matters, Cost

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• We took special pride in the fact that climbing rocks and icefalls had no economic value in society...We were like a wild species living in the edges of an ecosystem - adaptable, resilient and tough.

  Yvon Chouinard

  Adventure, Pride, Rocks

  Yvon Chouinard (2006). “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman”, p.18, Penguin

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• Oil depletion and climate change will create an entirely new context in which political struggles will be played out. Within that context, it is not just freedom, democracy, and equality that are at stake, but the survival of billions of humans and of whole ecosystems.

  Richard Heinberg

  Struggle, Oil, Political

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• What would it mean if there were a theory that explained everything? And just what does "everything" actually mean, anyway? Would this new theory in physics explain, say the meaning of human poetry? Or how economics work? Or the stages of psychosexual development? Can this new physics explain the currents of ecosystems, or the dynamics of history, or why human wars are so terribly common?

  Ken Wilber

  War, Mean, Historical

  Ken Wilber (2001). “A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality”, p.11, Shambhala Publications

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• Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem.

  Stephen Elop

  Share, Devices, Competitors

  "Nokia on 'burning platform' warns boss" by Charles Arthur, www.theguardian.com. February 9, 2011.

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• We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.

  Chris Hedges

  Crush, Lying, War

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