Ecological Integrity Quotes

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.

In terms of wilderness preservation, Alaska is the last frontier. This time, given one great final chance, let us strive to do it right. Not in our generation, nor ever again, will we have a land and wildlife opportunity approaching the scope and importance of this one.

We have to speak out now on behalf of our community and on behalf of the land and say they're the same thing and say No, we are not rolling over and No, this is not a corporate enterprise. This is democracy in the fullest sense and we must have regard and reverence and those are the cornerstones of a just society.

The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally.

Sustainability is another word for justice, for what is just is sustainable and what is unjust is not.

The Earth Charter is important as an expression of the commitment of people throughout the Earth to evoke their own deepest moral, spiritual and ethical principles in the task of ensuring a sustainable future for those who inhabit the Earth now and those who will follow us on the Earth.

The environmental movement can only survive if it becomes a justice movement. As a pure environmental movement, it will either die, or it will survive as a corporate 'greenwash'. Anyone who's a sincere environmentalist can't stand that role.

The Endangered Species Act was designed to preserve biodiversity, not enrich trial lawyers and political activists.

The natural world is a package deal; you don't get to select which facts you like and which you don't.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

The most profound and serious indication of the moral implications underlying the ecological problem is the lack of respect for life evident in many of the patterns of environmental pollution.

It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

Nature, and the original system that created us, must always remain somehow with us, the bedrock of our movements and actions. What is our duty? To live a life.

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

It is a kind of church, back in these last cores. It may not be your church -- this last one percent of the West – but it is mine, and I am asking unashamedly to be allowed to continue worshipping the miracle of the planet, and the worship of a natural system not yet touched, never touched by the machines of man. A place with the residue of God – the scent, feel, sight, taste, and sound of God – forever fresh upon it

Birds ... are sensitive indicators of the environment, a sort of "ecological litmus paper," ... The observation and recording of bird populations over time lead inevitably to environmental awareness and can signal impending changes.

I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planet;As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.

Wilderness designations should not be the result of a quid pro quo. They should rise or fall on their own merits.

A functioning eco-system is a human need.

As a word, ecology has been so debased by recent political usage that many people employ it to identify anything good that happens far from cities and without human interference.