Frans Lanting Quotes

This all comes down to what we know about life on Earth.

In the last 680 million years of the four and a half billion that this planet has existed, life has been determined by two principal forces: the warmth and the diffused energy of the sunlight coming through our atmosphere, and water. Those are the primordial forces of life - sunlight and water.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

If every human being disappeared off the face of the earth in an instant, the earth would still keep spinning and the planet would develop new life forms.

Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.

Essentially, all life on the planet is coming from the earth. Whether it is a human being or an earthworm, it is the same soil.

To many people, 'biodiversity' is almost synonymous with the word 'nature,' and 'nature' brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.

Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.

Life solves its problems with well-adapted designs, life-friendly chemistry and smart material and energy use.

Basically, the intersection between the animal world and the plant world is where life regenerates itself over and over, billions of times each day. It's the foundation of life on our planet.

Every seed is awakened, and all animal life.

Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

It is only of life on Earth, however, that one can speak with any certainty. It seems to me that all life on Earth, the sum total of life upon the Earth, has purpose.

We're the only creature God ever created that doesn't want to adapt. We want to make it stand still. And one thing that's constant is nature is constantly changing.

We'll all die out eventually. Humans will be gone. And all I'm saying is, when people worry about polar bears disappearing or whatever, it's like, 'Well that's life, things will come and go, we'll find new species.'

When you think about the complexity of our natural world - plants using quantum mechanics for photosynthesis, for example - a smartphone begins to look like a pretty dumb object.

We share deep admiration for evolution, a force of Nature that has led to the finest chemistry of all time, and to all living things on this planet.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.

There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.

I think you can say that life is a system in which proteins and nucleic acids interact in ways that allow the structure to grow and reproduce. It's that growth and reproduction, the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.

The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans.

The Earth has been lawned with life for something over 3.5 billion years. That's a span of time great enough to encompass some honest-to-goodness catastrophe. For example, 700 million years ago, Earth underwent a planet-wide deep freeze, with ice covering the oceans from the poles to the equator.