Nutrient Cycle Quotes

The very substance which last week was grazing in the field, waving in the milk pail, or growing in the garden, is now become part of the man.

Deaths have benefits. They can fertilise the ground.

Life - all life - is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.

The food you eat today is walking and talking tomorrow.

They fail to recognize the broad biological principle that organic material is constantly being recycled. Everything has a time of being - a birth, a life span, and a death.

In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.

Every fish fertilizes the water in a way that generates the plankton that ultimately leads back into the food chain, but also yields oxygen, grabs carbon - it's a part of what makes the ocean function and what makes the planet function.

Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it.

It's impossible to contemplate the life of soil very long without seeing its analogy to the life of the spirit.

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

People don't even understand that every bit of our food was once alive. We take another creature, plant, animal, microorganism, tear it apart in our mouths. And incorporate those molecules into our own bodies. We are the Earth in the most profound way.

The world depends on fungi, because they are major players in the cycling of materials and energy around the world.

Nothing is wasted in the sea; every particle of material is used over and over again, first by one creature, then by another. And when in spring the waters are deeply stirred, the warm bottom water brings to the surface a rich supply of minerals, ready for use by new forms of life.

The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation.

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.