#ecology

The site I landed on feels much more isolated than it really is; it's almost magical. Within its limited radius, there was a whole range of the local ecology. ↗

— Martin Puryear

#ecology #feels #i #isolated #landed

It was not enough that food aplenty was within Man’s grasp: he wanted more. It was not enough that prey surrendered themselves to Man according to the natural order: Man wanted to cook his prey. Man had discovered fire when lightning stuck and set a tree or two alight, but he was clumsy and greedy and stupid and could not keep the flame alive ↗

— David Bowles

#myth #religion #responsibility #food

The social phenomenon of economic growth is, thanks to the principle of the conservation of matter, nothing other than the physical phenomenon of increasing resource depletion. ↗

— Craig Dilworth

#economics #sociology #sociology

Death is nature's way of making things continually interesting. Death is the possibility of change. Every individual gets its allotted lifespan, its chance to try something new on the world. But time is called and the molecules which make up leaf and limb, heart and eye are disassembled and redistributed to other tenants. ↗

— Peter Steinhart

#cycle #death #ecology #life #change

I love it when people yell at me about the environment and then I tell 'em I'm burning 90% cleaner than them. ↗

— Neil Young

#clean-energy #ecology #environment #green #save-the-planet

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us. ↗

— Mark Kurlansky

#ecology #evolution #extinction #humans #natural-world

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#economics #nature #society #men

If a product is more expensive than another one, and more sustainable in ecology, consumers will not buy it. ↗

— Jean Claude

#buy #consumers #ecology #expensive #more

Wolves directly affect the entire ecosystem, not just moose populations, their main prey, because less moose equals more tree growth ↗

— Rolf Peterson

#ecology #ecosystems #moose #trees #wolves

We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity. ↗

— David Watson

#modernity #myth #science #social-ecology #age