Only in the last moment in history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.
Out of the water, I am nothing.
It is now well understood that humans ultimately depend on the health of the planet for their wellbeing.
Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people.
My fear is that we are losing sight of how much we depend on the EPA to protect not just our environment but the people who live in it.
The idea of absolute freedom is fiction. It's based on the idea of an independent self. But in fact, there's no such thing. There's no self without other people. There's no self without sunlight. There's no self without dew. And water. And bees to pollinate the food that we eat...So the idea of behaving in a way that doesn't acknowledge those reciprocal relationships is not really freedom, it's indulgence.
We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.
Without the land, the rivers, the oceans, the forests, the sunshine, the minerals and thousands of natural resources we would have no economy whatsoever
Presumably, technology has made man increasingly independent of his environment. But, in fact, technology has merely substituted nonrenewable resources for renewables, which is more an increase than a decrease in dependence.
In the country, it feels like you don't have control over nature anymore - nature is in control of you.
Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.
Shoes and clothing damage our ability to survive naked in the wilderness.
There is too little public recognition of how much we all depend upon farmers as stewards of our soil, water and wildlife resources.
Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind's self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind's existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet.
...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
Today we understand that the future of humanity very much depends on our planet, and that the future of the planet very much depends on humanity.
The living environment is the biosphere, the thin layer around the world of living organisms. We're part of that. Our existence is dependent on it in ways that people haven't even begun to appreciate. Our existence depends not just on its existence, but its stability and its richness.
The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human sepcies has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.
So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.
Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy.
For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world.
We borrow from nature the space upon which we build.
We understand that we must make peace with nature - that our lives depend on it.
think we're still stuck in that agricultural mindset, where we imagine that we can shape the Earth. Sure, we can do that. But the Earth has the power to shape us much more powerfully. To survive climate change, we'll have to realize how dependent we are on our ecosystems for our own survival.
