Ecology

Quotes for Gardeners, Farmers,
and Lovers of the Green Way

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

Everything is connected to everything else.
Everything must go somewhere.
Nature knows best.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
If you don't put something in the ecology, it's not there."
- Barry Commoner's Five Laws of Ecology

If you want to see an endangered species, get up and look in the mirror.
- John Young, former Apollo astronaut

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The study of Nature is intercourse with the Highest Mind.
- Louis Agassiz

Our moral and ethical responsibility is to protect other species in
the spirit of husbandry rather than destroy them in and attitude of conquest.
- Charles Southwick

Gardeners are key land managers. Our choices therefore lie not
in whether but in how we manage the land. We would all agree that
we must do it in an ecologically responsible way.
- George Seddon, Gardening Responsibility

This we know... the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to earth.
All things are connected, like the blood which connects one family. Whatever
befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life -
he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
- Chief Seattle, 1854

Nature is what she is - amoral and persistent.
- Stephen Jay Gould

It's the flock, the grove, that matters.
Our responsibility is to species, not to specimens;
to communities, not to individuals."
- Sara Stein, 1998, Author of Noah's Garden

Everyone lives downstream from someone else.
- Anonymous

Wildness can be a way of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures,
a part of the geography of hope.
- Wallace Stenger

Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.
- Hubert H. Humphrey

After all, this is a world of rock and water and air.
It is elemental. It is not ours.
- Janet Kauffman

Quotes for Gardeners

A Collection Growing to Over 2,700 Quotes, Arranged by over 130 Topics
Quotes, Sayings, Proverbs, Poetry, Maxims, Quips, Clichés, Adages
Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo

The river Rhine, it is well known,
Doth wash your city of Cologne;
But tell me, nymphs! what power divine
Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?
- Samuel T. Coleridge, 1772-1834, Cologne

In order for something to become clean,
something else must become dirty.
- Imbesi's Conservation of Filth Law

Conservation

A garden is an awful responsibility. You never know
what you may be aiding to grow in it.
- Charles Dudley Warner

It was not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were
the dimmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over all, rocks,
wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature
stirred the soul to its inmost depths.
- Thomas Cole

Interdependence - Quotes for Gardeners

Natural objects themselves, even when they make no claim
to beauty, excite the feelings, and occupy the imagination.
Nature pleases, attracts, delights, merely because it is nature.
We recognize in it an Infinite Power.
- Karl Wilhelm Humboldt

We are all fools! Blinded with greed, we rape the earth and declare
ourselves its masters. We glut ourselves with the riches, cut the
forests down like wheat, and jingling our dollars cannot hear the
voice of intolerable unrest within us. Beware America! The earth
too has a voice which someday we must answer.
- Frank Waters, The Dust Within the Rock, , 1940

Not blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress.
- Anonymous

When all is said and done, is there any more wonderful sight, any moment when
man's reason is nearer to some sort of contact with the nature of the world
than the sowing of seeds, the planting of cuttings, the transplanting of shrubs
or the grafting of slips?
- St. Augustine

Of all the lands in the world's temperate zones, China has the greatest number of
plant species; the eastern United States has the next largest number.
- Edwin T. Morris

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
When we see land as a community to which we belong,
we may begin to use it with love and respect.
- Aldo Leopold

The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done -
challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.
- Jean Houston

Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way;
she better understands her own affairs than we.
- Michel De Montaigne

Wilderness - Quotes for Gardeners

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.
It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that
inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador a greater
wildness than in some recess of Concord.
- Henry David Thoreau

Nature soon takes over if the gardener is absent.
- Penepole Hobhouse

Nature is the most thrifty thing in the world; she never wastes anything;
she undergoes change, but there's no annihilation - the essence remains.
- T. Binney

Nature is not a place to visit, it is home.
- Gary Snyder

Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible.
Richard Brinsley Sheriden, 1800

Forests and Trees

Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness
and of a social condition that has always contained the potential
of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology.
The great project of our time must be to open the other eye:
to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the
cleavage between humanity and nature
that came with early wisdom.
- Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom

Some animals are always busy cleaning up the dung and dead.
Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise.
Dearly respect the lifestyle of worms.
You can sometimes get a handle on life, but it often breaks.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions

Ecology

Selected Readings

Aldo Leopold

In Context: A quarterly magazine of Humane Sustainable Culture.

Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered. By Bill Devall and George Sessions. Salt Lake City, Utah, Gibbs Smith, Publisher, Peregrine Smith Books, c 1985. 267 pages. Bibliography, numerous appendices. ISBN: 0-87905-247-3. $16.95. An outstanding overview of the principles and persons leading the ecology and conservation movements. Many quotes and references to important documents, seminal thinkers, and events.

Education/Conservation Links

The EnviroLink Library

The Environment. With Patricia Michaels.

Environmental Organization Web Directory Very well organized and comprehensive links.

The Ethical Legacy of Aldo Leopold

The Land Beyond the Rim: Sigurd Olson's Wilderness Theology. By David Backes.

Readings to Uplift a Gardener's Spirits From The Spirit of Gardening Website

Solstice: Sustainable Energy

The Spiritual Naturalist A good introduction to nature mysticism in many traditions. By Larry Gates.

Steen's Renewable Energy Website

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