"We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are."
— Stephen Jay Gould (The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History)

"By eating meat we share the responsibility of climate change, the destruction of our forests, and the poisoning of our air and water. The simple act of becoming a vegetarian will make a difference in the health of our planet."
— Thich Nhat Hanh (The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology)

"A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people. "
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

"as jolaha ka maram na jana, jinh jag ani pasarinhh tana;
dharti akas dou gad khandaya, chand surya dou nari banaya;
sahastra tar le purani puri, ajahu bine kathin hai duri;
kahai kabir karm se jori, sut kusut bine bhal kori;


No one could understand the secret of this weaver who, coming into existence, spread the warp as the world; He fixed the earth and the sky as the pillars, and he used the sun and the moon as two shuttles; He took thousands of stars and perfected the cloth; but even today he weaves, and the end is difficult to fathom.

Kabir says that the weaver, getting good or bad yarn and connecting karmas with it, weaves beautifully. "
— Kabir (The Bijak of Kabir)

"To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them.

At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?"
— Derrick Jensen (Endgame: Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization)

"On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That's one reason why it's easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred about creation. And that is why it's easy for rabid environmentalists to hate chainsaws even though they snuggle into a mattress supported by a black walnut bedstead."
— Joel Salatin (Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal)

"Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
— Guy Billout

"Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world."
— Henry Miller

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction"
— Rachel Carson

"We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and I will say the love we give our fragile craft. "
— Adlai Stevenson

"Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter were the basis for reality What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tall grass prairie can be 'saved' or even 'restored.' Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills and the living ebb and flow of the tall grass prairies died with the plowing of the Great Plains. What if we suggested that a thing is what it does? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was a immense aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale.

This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate again a away that we can recognize as being "them," we understand that they are gone even before they are dead."
— Jeffrey A. Lockwood

"Tell me of what plant-birthday a man takes notice, and I shall tell you a good deal about his vocation, his hobbies, his hay fever, and the general level of his ecological education."
— Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac)

"Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall,
but the moving ever shall stay."
— Basava (The lord of the meeting rivers: Devotional poems of Basavanna)

"This is where the will to grapple with our hard and pressing environmental problems begins: in relationship to something other that you love beyond any utility, beyond any logic."
— Susan Freinkel (American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree)

"There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of beind except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . . name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one."
— Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing)

"Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like. "
— Rebecca Solnit (Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics)

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

"
— Rolf Peterson, professor of Ecology

"Le regard analytique et le regard intuitif sur la vie ne peuvent s'harmoniser dans un même être que dans la mesure où le premier est subordonné au second. C'est du second, et notamment du sentiment de beauté et de compassion qu'il enferme, que découle le sens de la totalité de même que celui des équilibres et de la limite. Le regard intuitif est la condition de la sagesse sans laquelle le regard analytique peut conduire à des excès suicidaires. L'analyse des phénomènes donne de la puissance sur eux, elle permet de dominer la nature, mais elle n'enferme aucune indication quant aux limites qu'il convient d'assigner à cette puissance."
— James Lovelock

"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 (The Company of Wolves)

"Si l'organisme vivant est un system hiérarchisé dont le niveau d'organisation est au-dessus du niveau chimique, il est alors évident qu'il doit être étudié à tous les niveaux et qu'une recherche limitée à l'un d'entre eux (niveaux chimique par exemple) ne peut remplacer celle effectuée aux niveau supérieurs."
— J. H. Woodger

"Il faut regarder la configuration ensemble pour déterminer le comportement des parties et non l'inverse."
— Paul Weiss

"Il nous faut partir d'une conception d'ensemble de l'organisme en tant qu'une entité fondamentale de la biologie, puis comprendre comment celui-ci se divise en parties qui respectent son ordre intrinsèque - pour donner un organisme harmonieusement intégré en dépit de sa complexité."
— Brian Goodwin

"An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex."
— Aldous Huxley

"Having a place means that you know what a place means...what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense...Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness"
— Gary Snyder

"There is a saying that 'the psychotic drowns in the waters that the mystic swims in.' The health and structural integrity of the ego means the difference between spiritual emergence, the unfolding of a transpersonal identity; and a spiritual emergency a crisis brought on by the same unfolding, during which the foundations of sanity can be shaken."
— Jason Kirkey (The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality)

"And daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay"
"Well, I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in asking
Mister Peabody's coal train has hauled it away."
— John Denver

"Horticulture, in its innumerable manifestations, is a hobby that can go with you anywhere at any time, just like your shadow. No one interested in plants and the living world can ever be bored. "
— Thalassa Cruso (To everything there is a season;: The gardening year with Thalassa Cruso)

"The psychotic drowns in the waters that the mystic swims in."
— Jason Kirkey (The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality)