natural interconnectedness Quotes

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow-mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go.

The Earth is our mother just turning around, with her trees in the forest and roots underground. Our father above us whose sigh is the wind, paint us a rainbow without any end.

People today have forgotten they're really just a part of nature. Yet, they destroy the nature on which our lives depend. They always think they can make something better... They don't know it, but they're losing nature. They don't see that they're going to perish. The most important things for human beings are clean air and clean water.

Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to over-all improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis is a warning that we have delayed nearly too long.

Plants were bound for good or ill to their places. They expressed not only beauty but also the thoughts of God's world, with an intent of their own and without deviation. Trees in particular were mysterious and seemed to me direct embodiments of the incomprehensible meaning of life. For that reason, the woods were the places where I felt closest to its deepest meaning and to its awe-inspiring workings.

It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.

The environment is in us, not outside of us. The trees are our lungs, the rivers our bloodstream. We are all interconnected, and what you do to the environment ultimately you do to yourself.

And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.

But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

We are a species that has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look, and listen.

Man is not himself only...He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources...He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys.

Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature’s services in a world of close to seven billion people.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves.

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche.

The quality of place, the reaction to immediate contact with earth and growing things that have a fugal relationship with mountains and sky, is essential to the integrity of our existence on this planet.

The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It's just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.

As long as we relate to the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the fields and the oceans as properties which we can manipulate according to our real or fabricated needs, nature remains opaque, and does not reveal to us its true being.

Man's home is nature; his purposes and aims are dependent for execution upon natural conditions. Separated from such conditions they become empty dreams and idle indulgences of fancy.

Every thread of creation is held in position by still other strands of things living. In an earthly tapestry hung from the skyline of smoldering cities so gray and so vulgar, as not to be satisfied with their own negativity, but needing to touch all the living as well.

We have roots that grow towards each other underground. And when all the pretty blossom has fallen from our branches we find that we are one tree and not two.

To be whole and harmonious, man must also know the music of the beaches and the woods. He must find the thing of which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it, if he is to live.

I think our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves unless our values are based on planetary values, are linked to the values of the rest of nature. Intelligence is not a license to trample. The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver and maintainer of balance.