Of all creatures on earth, in proportion to their size and weight, humans have the smallest footprint on the ground and the largest on the environment.

We haven’t got a spare planet. If we had it, we would sell it long time ago.

Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,things standing shall fall,but the moving ever shall stay.

The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . . If the race is won, humanity...

In the ocean, you have a very dense ecology of microbes, particularly in the surface.

But if you were any different you wouldn’t be human.

Knowing nature is part of knowing God. Faith directs us to the invisible God, but leads us back from God to the entire visible world.

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.

If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.

Ecological awareness expands the context of life; it also enlarges who we are as a person.

Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on humanity’s relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we’ve learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a century...

Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.

This isn’t about keeping mountains looking pretty. Ending mountaintop removal is about keeping humanity alive.

Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter’s work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter’s] colour photographs:...

Rural places have hemorrhaged their best and brightest children, their intellectuals, thinkers, organizers, leaders, and artists-those who would create change and who would parent another generation of thinkers. All gone.Our seeds are disappearing.

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator,...

Recently I keep thinking that this isn’t about the survival of a species. It’s about why we’re never satisfied with what we need, why we always take a bit more.

Il nous faut partir d’une conception d’ensemble de l’organisme en tant qu’une entité fondamentale de la biologie, puis comprendre comment celui-ci se divise en parties qui respectent son ordre intrinsèque – pour donner un organisme...

The linages between the nodes that form the web of life- how delightful.

The evolution revolution is here. Global sense makes common sense.

The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and...

rights of the unborn” as though a human life begins at conception but we don’t need to concern ourselves with its prospects after birth. Raging over the divine sanctity of anyone else’s pregnancy is a...

Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there...

Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God’s prior and original gift of things that are....

The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface.The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust.The ocean is a place of skin, rich...

The scene is most beautiful without people in it. People just screw things up. Forget the whole thing, the world, all the living people, I tell myself, and it has a ring of truth to...

This summer temperatures will soar high and may kill many birds due to lack of water. PLEASE KEEP A BOWL OF WATER IN YOUR BALCONY, WINDOW OR IN OPEN PLACES and save their lives, instead...

We humans have a questionable track record in our dealings with the environment. Recent studies show that complete restoration of Florida’s Everglades could take approximately 30 years and 7.8 billion dollars. There’s a lot of...

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That lands yields a cultural harvest is a fact long...

Men say they know many things;But lo! they have taken wings, —The arts and sciences,And a thousand appliances;The wind that blowsIs all that any body knows

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are...

Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us...

Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one’s special emphasis is global...

We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans...

But as the Everglades continued to wither, a few of their colleagues began to wonder if conservation really should mean development more than preservation. These heretics did not believe that God had created man in...

…we do not own these woods. They own us.

Compared to forest or aquatic ecosystems, grassland is unstable. It requires rather precise geological and climatic conditions, and if these conditions are not maintained–if too much rain falls, or too little–it quickly turns into forest...

King Solomon’s Ring,” I have become increasingly interested in the study of animals for what they might teach us about man, and the study of man as an animal. I have become increasingly disenchanted with...

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn

We forest officers, who acquiesced in the extinguishment of the bear, knew a local rancher who had plowed up a dagger engraved with the name of one of Coronado´s captains. We spoke harshly of the...

I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast...

On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That’s one reason why it’s easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred...

…It’s not that the worm forgives the plough; it gives it no mind. (Pain occurs, in passing.) (lines 37-39 in the poem ‘Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA’)

The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eating implies a natural biological relationship. This culture doesn’t just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture...

Le regard analytique et le regard intuitif sur la vie ne peuvent s’harmoniser dans un même être que dans la mesure où le premier est subordonné au second. C’est du second, et notamment du sentiment...

I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life’s factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts,...

Some people hear the voice of God in their dreams or through prayer or meditation. For me, God is truly in the details—the details found in the connections between the living things on the planet...

Luxury as beauty” has nothing to do with a particular place or an object’s price tag. It is seeing with eyes for beauty. Once we cut the automatic but learned connection between buying stuff and...

It is clear that corporate America has an obligation to create a fairer, more equitable, more sustainable economy for no other reason than self-preservation.

Getting up too early is a vice habitual in horned owls, stars, geese, and freight trains. Some hunters acquire it from geese, and some coffee pots from hunters.