Let us be good stewards of the Earth we inherited. All of us have to share the Earth's fragile ecosystems and precious resources, and each of us has a role to play in preserving them. If we are to go on living together on this earth, we must all be responsible for it.
Water is our most precious and interconnected natural resource. It sustains all ecosystems, communities, and economies from local watersheds to the seas. It's vital to sustaining our health, safety, and the environments in which we live and work. Simply put, water is life.
We need to start looking at having a way of managing the whole ecosystem, because you can't pick away at it piece by piece, you have to truly start being coordinated and managing our resources as a system. We haven't gotten to that point yet.
The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.
The suffering that food animals undergo, the suffering of those who eat them and profit by them, the suffering of starving people who could be fed with the grain that feeds these animals, and the suffering we thoughtlessly impose on the ecosystem, other creatures, and future generations are all interconnected. It is this interconnectedness of suffering, and its reverse, of love, caring, and awareness, that calls out for our understanding.
The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans. Our challenge for the future is that we realize we are very much a part of the earth's ecosystem, and we must learn to respect and live according to the basic biological laws of nature.
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.
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.
Your body isn't just a body. It's an ecosystem.
The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.
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.
You cannot tackle hunger, disease, and poverty unless you can also provide people with a healthy ecosystem in which their economies can grow.
Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.
We cannot interfere in one area of the ecosystem without paying due attention to both the consequences of such interference in other areas and to the well-being of future generations.
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.
Often we treat certain aspects of ourselves as junk, having no value. We try to throw parts of ourselves in the garbage. But a human being is an ecosystem, and everything in that system is of value to the whole.
We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth.
No piecemeal solution is going to prevent the collapse of whole societies and ecosystems ... a radical re-thinking of our values, priorities and political systems is urgent.
A large animal needs a large area. If you protect that area, you're also protecting thousands of other plants and animals. You're saving all these species that future generations will want - you're saving the world for your children and your children's children. . . . The destruction of species is final. If you lose a species, you lose the genes, you lose all the potential drugs and potential foods that could be useful to the next generations. The ecosystems will not function as they have.
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.
There are ecosystems like coral reefs [at risk] through ocean acidification. Those are valuable things that we should protect.
Since nature has the most sustainable ecosystem and since ultimately agriculture comes out of nature, our standard for a sustainable world should be nature's own ecosystem.
Do you know what my favorite renewable fuel is? An ecosystem for innovation.
The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the environment, to the ecosystem. This is the Gaian mind. This is what the goddess really is. The goddess is a network of connective intelligence that is operating on this planet.
Anyplace of work where you have a cross section of work, you have mini-ecosystem. A little representation of what the planet is. You have the Alpha Dog. You have the young ones, the old ones. The pissed off one. The quiet one.