Ecological Relationships Quotes

Whether we consciously realize it or not, the biodiversity with which we are most familiar, and the biodiversity with which we have most intimate historical, cultural and biological connections, is that associated with food plants.

Nature is good at connectivity. The impact of diverse human activities is observed and absorbed throughout nature. Everything is linked. Nature has no problem with coherence. Ecosystems react with their own logic.

What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?

I do think that I have a more flexible view of the interactions between people, and between human and non-human protagonists, humans and their landscapes.

I did physics because of my love of nature. As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology.

Not only does every animal live at the expense of some other animal or plant, but the very plants are at war.... The individuals of a species are like the crew of a foundered ship, and none but good swimmers have a chance of reaching the land.

I work very hard on finding good characters who can explain things to me, and I use them to help tell the story. I organize my pieces not just around people but around animals and plants, energy flows, the path that carbon takes through the food system.

Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people.

Mathematics without natural history is sterile, but natural history without mathematics is muddled.

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering.

What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet.

Our land-healing ministry really is about cultivating relationships: between the people, the loving stewards, and the ecology of a place, what I call the environmental umbilical that we're nurturing here.

Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God's property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.

I love investigating the natural world, and I find a lot of truths there, truths about survival and beauty - nature continually surprises me (amazing how clever a woodchuck is, amazing how plants roots can break up concrete, amazing how delicious the thimbleberry is!).

Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is - or should be - the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all - perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.

I also assume that they are not simply the physical properties of things as now conceived by physical science. Instead, they are ecological, in the sense that they are properties of the environment relative to an animal.