Gretel Ehrlich Quotes

Life on earth is such a good story you cannot afford to miss the beginning... Beneath our superficial differences we are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself.

Nature promotes mutualism. The flower nourishes the bee. The river waters quench the thirst of all living beings. And trees provide a welcoming home to so many birds and animals. There is a rhythm to this togetherness.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

They are unique in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life that they enclose.

Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.

Because of my medical and ideological training, I am accustomed to saying that life is adaptation and symbiosis.

If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!

Manifold subsequent experience has led to a truer appreciation and a more moderate estimate of the importance of the dependence of one living being upon another.

A long time ago, I became aware that many of us have a tendency to lump nature into simplistic categories, such as what we consider beautiful or ugly, important or unimportant. As human a thing as that is to do, I think it often leads us to misunderstand the respective roles of life forms and their interconnectedness.

It is funny how we talk about nature as this separate entity when we are nature, and nature is us.

Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.

We are all part of the ecosystem.

There is no differentiation between all living things: trees, river, animals, and humans. We are all one interdependent organism, so our focus may seem broad but each element interacts with the other. We have so many phenomenal eyes, skills, and hands on deck. It's mind-blowingly exciting.

In nature nothing exists alone.

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands..... Relations are what matter most.

Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.

The creatures that inhabit this earth-be they human beings or animals-are here to contribute, each in its own particular way, to the beauty and prosperity of the world.

It's an appreciation for life generally, every bit of life, the smallest creature that lives in the intestines of termites that make termite life possible - to the leaves that turn out oxygen and grab carbon dioxide and with water make simple sugars that feed much of the world. I mean, these are everyday miracles.

Our health relies entirely on the vitality of our fellow species on Earth.

To recognize that nature has neither a preference for our species nor a bias against it takes only a little courage.

There's an interdependence between flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees, there are no flowers. They are really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else.

There is no differentiation between all living things: trees, river, animals, and humans.

Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.

Nowhere on the shore is the relation of a creature to its surroundings a matter of a single cause and effect; each living thing is bound to its world by many threads, weaving the intricate design of the fabric of life.