Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle.
Our personal consumer choices have ecological, social, and spiritual consequences. It is time to re-examine some of our deeply held notions that underlie our lifestyles.
We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts
The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon to the equilibrium of the species and ecological whole, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.
We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems.
Finally, the ecological health of the Mississippi River and its economic importance to the many people that make their living or seek their recreation is based on a healthy river system.
Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.
The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
Is it too late to prevent us from self-destructing? No, for we have the capacity to design our own future, to take a lesson from living things around us and bring our values and actions in line with ecological necessity. But we must first realize that ecological and social and economic issues are all deeply intertwined. There can be no solution to one without a solution to the others.
By obtaining a sense of its place in the unfolding drama of life, set in an ecological theatre, so we can understand why it has become one of the leading players.
The more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.
If politics and business fail us, of course the military will be called in. In the developing world, the massive and repeated ecological disasters are quite commonly met by the military.
It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.
I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit...
The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done - challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.
Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.
A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.
We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.
or simply: