Rachel Carson Quotes

We are all part of the ecosystem.

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.

They were all too tightly bound together, men and women, creatures wild and tame, flowers, fruits and leaves, to ask that any one be spared. As long as the whole continued, the earth could go about its business.

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.

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.

In nature nothing exists alone.

We cannot learn freedom and responsibility within the confines of our own species. We cannot understand life and death and what they are for in exclusively human terms. Without that which is wild, the world becomes a cell block.

Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.

Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration.

The earth has a life of its own.

We have an impact on nature, and nature has an impact on us.

Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain.

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.

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.

Always acknowledge your position in the food chain... They eat because you grow the food.

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

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

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.

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

Every ecosystem, even a small one, is sustainable because it has certain ensembles and conditions and influences that are unique to it. And the biological ensembles are almost certainly, even the most modest ones, in the thousands of species. We don't know what's involved in the models - not even the beginnings. And yet we're trying to make a sustainable world, which has to include the natural world. The human species is triumphant, but it's got to get a grip. It's got to come to understand what's happened, why we're this way and what we're doing.

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.

Amory Lovins says the primary design criteria he uses is the question How do we love all the children? Not just our children, not just the ones who look like us or who have resources, not just the human children but the young of birds and salmon and redwood trees. When we love all the children, when that love is truly sacred to us in the sense of being most important, then we have to take action in the world to enact that love. We are called to make the earth a place where all the children can thrive.

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?