E. O. Wilson Quotes

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

It's not that hard to imagine the natural world recovering it's health in our absence: it's more difficult, and more necessary, to imagine it recovering its health in our presence.

I want to interpret the natural world and our links to it. It's driven by the belief of many world-class scientists that we're in the midst of an extinction crisis... This time it's us that's doing it.

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.

Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. Biodiversity is good, and I think it is good in technology as well.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.

Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are 'chosen', the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.

Nature is nobody's ally.

Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with many plants of many kinds with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms so different from each other and dependent on each other and so complex a manner have all been produced by laws acting around us.

Before that I was a scientist. I did research in population biology. And that's what I always go back to, it helps me to remember that people are not the end of the world, although we may be when it comes to it. We're just one species among millions in this world.

The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally.

You should really know what the complete natural world of your region is and know what all its interactions are and how you are interacting with it yourself. This is just part of the work of becoming who you are, where you are.

The living world is not a single array... connected by unbroken series of intergrades.

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.

I think very early on, my sisters and I understood the value of nature and what it can do for us, and that we are part of nature. Even if we are all seemingly intelligent beings and we're at the top of the food chain, that doesn't mean that we have to remove ourselves from nature.

Over time, we as humans have developed a different attitude towards nature and we've forgotten about our inner power.

Our challenge, our generation's unique challenge, is learning to live peacefully and sustainably in an extraordinarily crowded world. Our planet is crowded to an unprecendented degree. It is bursting at the seams. It's bursting at the seams in human terms, in economic terms, and in ecological terms

I don’t know how to save the world. I don’t have the answers or The Answer. I hold no secret knowledge as to how to fix the mistakes of generations past and present. I only know that without compassion and respect for all of Earth’s inhabitants, none of us will survive—nor will we deserve to.

On my 70th birthday, I was asked how I felt about mankind's prospects. This is my reply: We are behaving like yeasts in a brewer's vat, multiplying mindlessly while greedily consuming the substance of a finite world. If we continue to imitate the yeasts, we will perish as they perish, having exhausted our resources and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes. Unlike the yeasts, we have a choice. What will it be?

Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man?

The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here, and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why. Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that we dare not enter or possess.

Sure we fit. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. But the world wasn't made for us and it will endure without us.

There's more to this world than just people, you know.