Gregory Bateson Quotes

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

The big problem of our modern society is that we feel that we are separated from the nature. But it's just the opposite. We are interrelated and our DNA is the same. And only when human beings understand that, the nature will not be obstacle.

My focus is not on solving nature's deeper mysteries. It is on using nature's deeper mysteries to solve important societal problems.

Any living thing that hopes to live on the earth must fit into the ecosphere or perish.

People who are not addressing the issues of population control are not seriously addressing the environment.

We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

I think the world's still gonna be here in another 10, 20 years. But I'm not feeling great about things ecologically.

Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet

The voice of the natural world would be, "Could you please give us space and leave us alone to get along with our own lives and our own ways, because we actually know much better how to do it then when you start interfering."

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

My only desire is an intimate infusion with nature, and the only fate I wish is to have worked and lived in harmony with her laws.

Expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life - all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own.

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

The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.

Climate change is real. The science is compelling. And the longer we wait, the harder the problem will be to solve.

I'm not saying we don't have our set of problems - climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage - we surely do. But ultimately we knock them down.

The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally.

We are not talking about esthetics. We are talking about life: survival of Man. We must train young people to get another vision of Nature. We call it 'wilderness,' and we think it is progress to get further and further away from it. How crazy! Where would we have been if Nature had not built us up?

I believe that even 'returning-to-nature' and anti pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the over development of the present age.

There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself.

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

Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.

The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

To this day, I enjoy nature, the luxury of undisturbed wilderness, forests, mountains, lakes, rivers and deserts and their wildlife. But I also know that the greatest danger to their perpetuity is the pressure of human population.

I had nixed the idea of having children when I was myself a child, having learned in the 1960s that human overpopulation was literally crowding other species off the planet. Why create another mouth to gnaw at the overburdened earth?