Ecosystems Quotations

All of a sudden, if you think about the entire ecosystem of connected devices that can pull down information, access content and allow me to share and work and communicate, the vast majority now are not Windows computers. They are iPhones. They are iPads. They are Android devices.

The undisturbed coastal plain is home to a wide variety of plants and animals and is the only wilderness sanctuary in North America that protects a complete range of the arctic ecosystem.

The destruction of the natural beauty, the ecosystems, and the majesty of mountains affect us in ways we're not even aware of. Every time a mountain is beheaded, we chop off a little part of our souls.

The Biblical world view sees Earth and its ecosystems as the effect of a wise God's creation and... therefore robust, resilient, and self-regulating, like the product of any good engineer.

If we brought the mammoth back to Siberia, maybe that would be good for the ecosystems that are changing because of climate change.

As somebody who participates in the overall PC ecosystem, it's totally great when faster wireless networks and standards come out or when graphics get faster. Windows 8 was like this giant sadness. It just hurts everybody in the PC business.

I have a lot of plants and fish and a pet lizard and Venus flytraps. I have a whole ecosystem in my room, like a running waterfall and different lights and sensors set on digital timers.

The Bahamas has mangrove nurseries, coral reefs, shallow sea grass beds, and deep oceanic trenches - all perfect ecosystems for sharks. Photographing multiple shark species in exquisite water was the assignment I had dreamed about from the start.

I love all of the ecosystems - mountains, deserts, rainforests. They're beautiful, and nature has so many different flavors to it.

We have reached a new milestone as a human family. With seven billion of us now inhabiting our planet, it is time to ask some fundamental questions. How can we provide a dignified life for ourselves and future generations while preserving and protecting the global commons - the atmosphere, the oceans and the ecosystems that support us?

The production of natural resources in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, stable natural hydrological cycles, fertile soils, a balanced climate and numerous other vital ecosystem services can only be permanently secured through the protection and sustainable use of biological diversity.

Putting our ecosystem in great peril is certainly not a part of Chinese culture that I know.

To be sure, American higher education is a diverse ecosystem, comprising institutions of all sizes, price tags, and mission statements.

Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.

Big businesses aren't the only ones in the economic ecosystem. Nobody should fall behind because of an unfair structure.

It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.

The G8 nations, together with the five major emerging economies of China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, use almost three-quarters of the Earth's biocapacity - the capacity of the world's ecosystems to produce natural resources and to reduce harmful substances.

Do you know what my favorite renewable fuel is? An ecosystem for innovation.

We have the capacity to create a remarkably different economy: one that can restore ecosystems and protect the environment while bringing forth innovation, prosperity, meaningful work, and true security.

The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.

Earth as an ecosystem stands out in the all of the universe. There's no place that we know about that can support life as we know it, not even our sister planet, Mars, where we might set up housekeeping someday, but at great effort and trouble we have to recreate the things we take for granted here.

As the GAO report recognizes, the long-term health of our forests relies on additional fuel reduction options and funding to reduce the risks that catastrophic fire poses to our nation's ecosystems, communities and federal budgetary resources.

Mycologists are few and far between. We are under-funded, poorly represented in the context of other sciences - ironic, as the very foundation of our ecosystems are directly dependent upon fungi, which ultimately create the foundation of soils.

Alibaba is an ecosystem that helps small business to grow.

The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives, homes and businesses lost, ecosystems destroyed, species driven to extinction, infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced.

Basically, I think 21st century conservation is moving toward preserving ecosystems by dealing with the needs of people.

People need to know that they have all the tools within themselves. Self-awareness, which means awareness of the body, awareness of their mental space, awareness of their relationships - not only with each other, but with life and the ecosystem.

No phenomenon can be isolated, but has repercussions through every aspect of our lives. We are learning that we are a fundamental part of nature's ecosystems.

By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

Voting is completely important. People in America think democracy is a given. I think of it as an ecosystem, and what gets in the way of it is politicians and apathy.

What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered.

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

I'd like to help repair the earth's ecosystems, and to fully live until I'm fully dead.

We've always taken a special interest in the health of coastal ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest. This fascinating lecture is a way we can educate the public about the importance of our coastal environment and its fragility.

To achieve true sustainability, we must reduce our "garbage index" - that which we permanently throw away into the environment that will not be naturally recycled for reuse - to near zero. Productive activities must be organized as closed systems. Minerals and other nonbiodegradable resources, once taken from the ground, must become a part of society's permanent capital stock and be recycled in perpetuity. Organic materials may be disposed into the natural ecosystems, but only in ways that assure that they are absorbed back into the natural production system.

The elk are the most abundant large herbivores in the Yellowstone ecosystem. There are thousands and thousands of them. They migrate in and out. And those migration routes need to stay open.

I stand by my assertions that although you can know what happens to any individual species that you modify, you cannot be certain what will happen to the ecosystem. Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat people. It's not that we need more food. It's that we need to manage our food system better.

I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life.

I find it quite useful to think of a free-market economy - or partly free market economy - as sort of the equivalent of an ecosystem. Just as animals flourish in niches, people who specialize in some narrow niche can do very well.

People like the robber barons assumed that the doctrine of the survival of the fittest authenticated them as deserving power. You know, "I'm the richest. Therefore, I'm the best. God's in his heaven, etc." And that reaction of the robber barons was so irritating to people that it made it unfashionable to think of an economy as an ecosystem. But the truth is that it is a lot like an ecosystem. And you get many of the same results.

The [film] industry is an ecosystem that's sick.

The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.

Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.

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.

The iWatch will fill a gaping hole in the Apple ecosystem. It will facilitate and coordinate not only the activities of all the other computers and devices we use, but a wide array of devices to come.

If you want a cow to be not just a cow but a milk machine, you can do a very good job at that by creating new hormones like the Bovine Growth Hormone. It might make the cow very ill, it might turn it into a drug addict, and it might even create consumer scares about the health and safety aspects of the milk. But we've gotten so used to manipulating objects and organisms and ecosystems for a single objective that we ignore the costs involved. I call this the "monoculture of the mind."

The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.

There are three types of biomimicry - one is copying form and shape, another is copying a process, like photosynthesis in a leaf, and the third is mimicking at an ecosystem's level, like building a nature-inspired city,

Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that's already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn.

There are encouraging examples of ecosystems being managed for the long-term to create wealth for poor communities, but there is still a huge job to do. Natural resources can be properly used to greatly reduce poverty. The time has come to reverse the course of worsening diseases, depleted natural resources, political instability, inequality, and the social corrosion of angry generations that have no means to rise out of poverty.

What we can learn right off is we've got to stop thinking the biggest things in these ecosystems were dinosaurs. This thing was the same length and maybe the same weight as a tyrannosaur.

It was the kind of blind, gulping, insensate greed that you associate with some milk-eyed creature in a volcanic fissure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench-an organism with no understanding of the existence, let alone the feelings, of other members of the ecosystem.

I would argue that practices that destroy ecosystems always destroy jobs.

I think one of the most important investments an organization like TNC [The Nature Conservancy] can make is in helping build local capacity - supporting the growth of a global network of small community-based entities. Help people who live within critical ecosystems help themselves and their neighbors to design a better future relationship between themselves and their natural resources.

There is a deep interconnectedness of all life on earth, from the tiniest organisms, to the largest ecosystems, and absolutely between each person.

I owned a 1972 Plymouth Valiant that we bought for $125. It was infested with cockroaches and geckos - it was its own little ecosystem.

When we settled our country, the dark forest was considered in some ways evil and something that you needed to plow or, later, bulldoze. We now have a new understanding of the interconnectedness of ecosystems and the need for bird flyways and why all species matter.

Soil scientists predicted this improvement more than a decade ago, ... and it has shown us that following sound science will benefit the health of the forest ecosystems in the long run.

Nature is good at connectivity. The impact of diverse human activities is observed and absorbed throughout nature. Everything is linked. Nature has no problem with coherence. Ecosystems react with their own logic.

If we wish to preserve the diversity of natural ecosystem processes, we must preserve the larger ecosystems where the longest food chains are found, ... As ecosystem size decreases (e.g., through the fragmentation of forest patches), we may see the loss of large, often rare, top predators. Those top predators that can survive in smaller ecosystems will likely feed lower in the food chain, which may alter the feeding relations and community structure through out the food web.

The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument may be distant from our shores, but it will help us understand how healthy marine ecosystems work and how we can revive troubled seas closer to home.

Humans have now become the dominant force controlling the ecosystems of the world, ... And we don't know what the implications are.

Life on the planet is being homogenized by the expanding human population and the frequent and rapid movement of people and goods, which carry invasive organisms with them. These invasives often flourish in their new ecosystems because, like the woolly adelgid, they have escaped their predators.

I think at all social networks, be it Facebook or Twitter or whatever it is, there's an ecosystem that exist there. But there's also an ego system that exists there.

Wildlife populations can act as buffers against the spread of disease as well as sources for its emergence. Through providing a better understanding of how pathogens move among species, the field of Conservation Medicine gives us the tools we need to maintain healthy ecosystems that protect people and wildlife.

We need to stop thinking of the environment as a passive element. It is a fundamental part of community-based decision making. Unfortunately, the poor often lack legal rights to ecosystems and are excluded from decisions about ecosystem management. Without addressing these failures through changes in governance, there is little chance of using the economic potential of ecosystems to reduce rural poverty.

You want to find the really crazy but still somewhat reasonable outliers within the customer ecosystem.

Even if we act immediately, the world is doomed to lose many of its animal and plant species and this inturn will reduce the ability of ecosystems to deliver vital services to human populations. The Red List gives all of us a practical tool for raising awareness of the biodiversity crisis and for forging new partnerships within the international community.

think we're still stuck in that agricultural mindset, where we imagine that we can shape the Earth. Sure, we can do that. But the Earth has the power to shape us much more powerfully. To survive climate change, we'll have to realize how dependent we are on our ecosystems for our own survival.

Eventually, humans invented agriculture, which could be understood as a way of turning the natural world into a tool for our use. There's evidence that we have been domesticating crops and animals for at least 15,000 years, adapting ecosystems to our preferred way of life.

Imagining the world without us is a recipe for despair and paralysis. I actually think it's more helpful to imagine the world before us, to look back at those unstable ecosystems of the Triassic and realize that were in another phase of unstable ecosystems. Knowing that, demystifying our situation as it were, makes it easier to think about solutions. We are not looking into the unknown. The only thing unknown about the situation is how we're going to fix it, and when.

The early Triassic was a period when the planet was recovering from the worst mass extinction it had ever known - that was the end Permian extinction, where climate change caused in part by mega-volcanic eruptions wiped out ninety-five percent of life on Earth. It took about ten or twenty million years for the planet's ecosystems to stabilize. During that time you saw a lot of weird, out-of-balance ecosystems where, for example, crocodile-like predators ripped the crap out of each other along the coasts.

Sometimes it's hard to take everyday concerns seriously when you think about vanished ecosystems that existed 300 million years ago and were eradicated by giant explosions. My goals haven't changed, because my goal has always been to save the world!

You can't start with imbalance and end with peace, be that in your own body, in an ecosystem or between a government and its people. What we need to strive for is not perfection, but balance.

The vast majority of species that are vanishing, we haven't even discovered yet. How can you possibly put them back in nature if the ecosystem is gone?

I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world.

We don't know nearly enough about the complexities of Nature. If we think we can eliminate natural ecosystems and substitute prosthetic devices, i.e. clean air or water with fusion energy - we are kidding ourselves.

While ants exist in just the right numbers for the rest of the living world, humans have become too numerous. If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plants and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land ecosystems almost everywhere.

Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so.

If enough species are extinguished, will the ecosystems collapse, and will the extinction of most other species follow soon afterward? The only answer anyone can give is: possibly. By the time we find out, however, it might be too late. One planet, one experiment.

Each of these [bacterial] species are masterpieces of evolution. Each has persisted for thousands to millions of years. Each is exquisitely adapted to the environment in which it lives, interlocked with other species to form ecosystems upon which our own lives depend in ways we have not begun even to imagine.

Now when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and a few birds fluttering around in the canopy. You are drastically imperiling a vast array of species within a few square miles of you. The number of these species may go to tens of thousands. ... Many of them are still unknown to science, and science has not yet discovered the key role undoubtedly played in the maintenance of that ecosystem, as in the case of fungi, microorganisms, and many of the insects.

Biological diversity is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it... Eliminate one species, and another increases to take its place. Eliminate a great many species, and the local ecosystem starts to decay.

We don't think a sustainable society need be stagnant, boring, uniform, or rigid. It need not be, and probably could not be, centrally controlled or authoritarian. It could be a world that has the time, the resources, and the will to correct its mistakes, to innovate, to preserve the fertility of its planetary ecosystems. It could focus on mindfully increasing quality of life rather than on mindlessly expanding material consumption and the physical capital stock.

Trying to save ecosystems has more to do with changing egosystems.

Your body isn't just a body. It's an ecosystem.

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

We have a duty to rescue our closest living relatives as part of our wider responsibilities to conserve the ecosystems they inhabit.

As the population in this region continues to grow and economic development increases, these countries must work together to ensure that ecosystems are preserved and adequate water supplies sustained.

These are top-level predators. Like us, they eat anchovies, squid, salmon and mussels. They are sentinels for human health, because they share our ecosystems and prey. We may see impacts in sea lions before people - they could be an early warning.

Sound management of ecosystems is key to a responsible path to growth.

The boundaries of the plan were actually developed by a scientific team without any kind of political pressure. Some of the very best scientists who know the Southern California desert ecosystems were involved.

For example, this was the case for arid and semi-arid areas where lawn irrigation and planting changed the ecosystems from shrub lands and desert to deciduous forests.

Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species.

improving wildland fire prevention and suppression, reducing hazardous fuels, restoring ecosystems and improving community assistance.

If you damage a forest a little bit, the forest can recover. Even damaged ecosystems can be restored to their former diversity through natural processes if they are allowed to do so.

how deeply human beings have penetrated into all the ecosystems that we visited and to look at the relationship between human use of their habitat and their well-being.

We are facing another economic meltdown. The ecosystem, on which the human species depends for life, is being destroyed at a rate that has not even been anticipated by climate scientists. We don't have a lot of time left. So either we get out and fight or we're finished. Fear is the only thing the Democratic Party has to offer - fear that the Republican Party is worse.

To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth-intellect ually and emotionally-and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

Turn off your televisions. Ignore the Newt-Mitt-Rick- Barack reality show. It is as relevant to your life as the gossip on “Jersey Shore.” The real debate, the debate raised by the Occupy movement about inequality, corporate malfeasance, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the security and surveillance state, is the only debate that matters.