Ecological Unity Quotes

Americans easily forget that the air they breathe is the same as those in Europe or Africa or Asia; it's the same air as Jesus breathed. I would like them to remember that connection.

In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We've re-understood that the world is one thing, and it's a living thing. It's a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.

Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself.

Nature draws no line between living and nonliving.

Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.

We will look upon the earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us.

There isn't a line that you can draw between the air and your body. We are the environment.

Essentially, all life on the planet is coming from the earth. Whether it is a human being or an earthworm, it is the same soil.

The ecological principle of unity in diversity grades into a richly mediated social principle; hence my use of the term social ecology.

We are literally linked in a circle, including with nature, as well as with other human beings. Old societies didn't have and still don't have "he" and "she." They don't have gendered pronouns. They don't have a word for nature, because we're not separate from nature.

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left. That is to say, you cannot love game and hate predators; you cannot conserve the waters and waste the ranges; you cannot build the forest and mine the farm. The land is one organism.

Life on earth is such a good story you cannot afford to miss the beginning... Beneath our superficial differences we are all of us walking communities of bacteria. The world shimmers, a pointillist landscape made of tiny living beings.

But human borders mean nothing to air, water, windblown soil or seeds or migrating fish, birds or mammals.

You are one miniscule piece of a never-ending cycle. In fact, you're not even a piece. You're just a holder for billions and billions of other pieces. Whether that's organic components, living organisms inside your body, bacteria or whatever it is, you're just part of the soup of the universe, so just try to enjoy what's good about it.