#ecology

Human use, population, and technology have reached that certain stage where mother Earth no longer accepts our presence with silence. ↗

— Dalai Lama XIV

#technology

The paradox of life lies exactly in this: its resources are finite, but it itself is endless. Such a contradictory state of affairs is feasible only because the resources accessible to life can be used over and over again. ↗

— I.I. Gitelson

#recycling #science #life

Well, I think I was always sort of reflecting where I was and my sense of surroundings and ecology, urban or country, or foreign, living in Europe, very affected by all of that. ↗

— Daniel Berrigan

#always #country #ecology #europe #foreign

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's not that the worm forgives the plough; it gives it no mind. (Pain occurs, in passing.) (lines 37-39 in the poem 'Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA') ↗

— Philip Gross

#poetry #wales #forgiveness

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

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

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