Barry Commoner Quotes

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

It is not oil or the environment, it is oil and the environment. We are living in the same world. We are not enemies.

Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

The message is not so much that the worms will inherit the Earth, but that all things play a role in nature, even the lowly worm.

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts... The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Nature has a way of giving back. And we can never go against it.

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.

All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the children of the Earth.

We should be evolving into a new age of business with a worldview that maintains one simple proposition - that all of nature: humans, animals, earth, are interconnected and interdependent.

The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.

Ecology is often confused with environmentalism, while in fact, environmentalism often leaves out the fact that people, too, can be a legitimate part of an ecosystem.

Nature! We are enveloped and embraced by her, incapable of emerging from her and incapable of entering her more deeply. Unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circuits of her dance, drifting onward with us herself, until we grow tired and drop from her arms.

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn't walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.

Economists don't seem to have noticed that the economy sits entirely within the ecology.

A functioning eco-system is a human need.

In nature nothing exists alone.

The trees are our lungs, the rivers our circulation, the air our breath, and the earth our body.

We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things.

Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.