#ecology

Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all. ↗

— Daniel Quinn

#ecology #philosophy #diversity

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

Archeology and ecology can go hand in hand. ↗

— Carlos Salinas de Gortari

#ecology #go #hand

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good. ↗

— William McDonough

#design #ecology #good #green #design

When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature’s gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart’s desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature’s gifts, to use them well. ↗

— Charles Eisenstein

#charles-eisenstein #ecology #economics #gaia #gift-giving

Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good. ↗

— Kevin McCloud

#design #ecology #home #urban-planning #architecture

The evolution revolution is here. Global sense makes common sense. ↗

— Judah Freed

#environment #global #occupy-wall-street #philosophy #philosophy-of-life