Ecological Role Quotes

Worms are the intestines of the earth.

While ants exist in just the right numbers for the rest of the living world, humans have become too numerous. If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plants and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land ecosystems almost everywhere.

The legendary tumbleweed is really a nurse crop that protects the growth of prairie grasses under its shade, and then it sacrifices itself and blows away.

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is.

Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.

We humans are a minority of giants stumbling around in a world of little things.

The forests of Russia and Brazil are the lungs of the Earth.

If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.

My job, my mission, what I have been put on this planet for is to save wildlife.

The creatures that inhabit this earth-be they human beings or animals-are here to contribute, each in its own particular way, to the beauty and prosperity of the world.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They're the cemetery workers.

None of God's Creatures absolutely consider'd are in their own Nature Contemptible; the meanest Fly, the poorest Insect has its Use and Vertue.

It is clear that if we are going to understand ocean ecosystems, we need to understand the part that bioluminescence plays in those ecosystems.

Any river is really the summation of a whole valley. It shapes not only the land but the life and even the culture of that valley. To think of any river as nothing but water is to ignore the greater part of it.

I take my part in the food chain very seriously.

The snakes have their place in the agricultural economy of the village, but our villagers do not seem realize it.

For though we may be the Earth's gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role - that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.