Interdependence of Life Quotes

Every new born being indeed comes fresh and blithe into the new existence, and enjoys it as a free gift: but there is, and can be, nothing freely given. It's fresh existence is paid for by the old age and death of a worn out existence which has perished, but which contained the indestructible seed out of which the new existence has arisen: they are one being.

There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.

All life connects ... Nothing happens that is meaningless.

There is a seamless web to life.. all life is sacred.

We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.

We need to go back to our relationship with nature and understand that those trees are our lungs. The earth is recycling as our body. The rivers are our circulation. This air is our breath. And the star stuff, the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen that comes from distant galaxies is actually the molecules of your body.

But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth, you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity.

We are the environment. The world is literally one biological process. The trees are our lungs. Look at the Amazon River system next to a human cardiovascular system, look at corals or trees and look at our lungs, you literally cannot tell the difference. They’re the same. So when we destroy our environment, we’re effectively destroying ourselves.

You can get an idea of human nature only when you can see the relationship of the individual human being to the whole cosmos.

Shallow ecology is anthropocentric, or human-centred. It views humans as above or outside nature, as the source of all value, and ascribes only instrumental, or 'use', value to nature. Deep ecology does not separate humans - or anything else - from the natural environment. It does see the world not as a collection of isolated objects but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology recognizes the intrinsic value of all human beings and views humans as just one particular strand in the web of life.

we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.

Because we all share this planet earth, we have to learn to live in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. This is not just a dream, but a necessity.

I'd like to see education play a larger role in our daily lives, have people come to a larger understanding - a "bigger picture" understanding - of how we fit into the world, and how we fit into the universe. Not necessarily thinking of ourselves, but thinking of others.

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.

Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.

A land ethic for tomorrow should...stress the oneness of our resources and the live-and-help-live logic of the great chain of life.

We live at a moment when our relationships to each other, and to all other beings with whom we share this planet, are up for grabs.

The little and the great are joined in one By God's great force. The wondrous golden sun Is linked unto the glow-worm's tiny spark; The eagle soars to heaven in his flight; And in those realms of space, all bathed in light, Soar none except the eagle and the lark.

Nature compels us to recognize the fact of mutual dependence, each life necessarily helping the other lives who are linked to it. In the very fibers of our being, we bear within ourselves the fact of the solidarity of life.