ecosystem stability Quotes

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

Nature knows best.

There is no place in nature for extinction.

The wolf pack will die when scattered by man, lonesome coyote survives.

If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world's ecosystems would collapse

The most irrevocable of [natures] laws says that a species cannot occupy a niche that appropriates all resources--there has to be some sharing. Any species that ignores this law winds up destroying its community to support its own expansion.

The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.

The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche.

Ecologically speaking, a spilt tanker load is like sticking a safety pin into an elephant's foot. The planet barely notices. After the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska the oil company spent billions tidying up the coastline, but it was a waste of money because the waves were cleaning up faster than Exxon could. Environmentalists can never accept the planet's ability to self-heal.

The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.

Nature does require her time of preservation, which perforce, I her frail son amongst my brethren mortal, must give my attendance to.

Even if one tree falls down it wouldn't affect the entire forest.

Nature is what you don't have to trouble about. It looks after itself.

A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.

The movements of nature are in a never ending circle. The animal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still probably moving in that train. For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should evanish by piece-meal; a conclusion not warranted by the local disappearance of one or two species of animals, and opposed by the thousands and thousands of instances of the renovating power constantly exercised by nature for the reproduction of all her subjects, animal, vegetable, and mineral.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms - folded them into its genes - and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.