Derrick Jensen Quotes

Look at the bark of a redwood, and you see moss. If you peer beneath the bits and pieces of the moss, you'll see toads, small insects, a whole host of life that prospers in that miniature environment. A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts... Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?

To those who study her, Nature reveals herself as extraordinarily fertile and ingenious in devising means, but she has no ends which the human mind has been able to discover or comprehend.

A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest.

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

There is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself

Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

If thou hadst thy will what wouldst thou reserve?" said Manwe. "Of all thy realm what dost thou hold dearest?" All have their worth," said Yavanna, "and each contributes to the worth of the others. But the kelvar can flee or defend themselves, whereas the olvar that grow cannot. And among these I hold trees dear. Long in the growing, swift shall they be in the felling, and unless they pay toll with fruit upon their bough little mourned in their passing. So I see in my thought, would that the trees might speak on behalf of all things that have roots, and punish those that wrong them!

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.

All life is part of a complex relationship in which each is dependent upon the others, taking from, giving to and living with all the rest.

A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. I am the forest's conscience, but remember, the forest eats itself and lives forever.

We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.

The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.

Man is not above nature, but in nature.

I sometimes lose interest in the characters and get much more interested in the trees and animals.

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.

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.

We share the earth not only with our fellow human beings, but with all the other creatures.

In nature nothing exists alone.

If we had kept the vision of interconnectedness, we would not have created the kind of environmental crisis facing the world today.

This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. By leaves we live.

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

For the forest to be green, each tree must be green.