"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, Five Laws of Ecology
"If you want to see an endangered
species, get up and look in the mirror."
- John Young, former Apollo astronaut
"The study of Nature is intercourse
with the Highest Mind."
- Louis Agassiz
"For the first half of geological time
our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria."
- Richard Dawkins
"Each portion of matter may be
conceived of as a garden full of plants,
and as a pond full of fishes. But each branch of the plant, each member
of the animal, each drop of its humors, is also such a garden or such a pond."
- Leibniz
"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
"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
by Anthony Huxley
by Ben Eric van Wyk 
by National Geographic
by Matthew Biggs
by Ben Eric van Wyk 
by John Vaughan
by Elizabeth Schneider
"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, Noah's Garden
"Everyone lives downstream from
someone else."
- Author Unknown
"Wildness can be a way of reassuring
ourselves of our sanity as creatures,
a part of the geography of hope."
- Wallace Stenger
"Man - despite his artistic
pretensions, his sophistication,
and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to
a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
- Author Unknown
"An agricultural adage says the tiny
animals that live below the
surface of a healthy pasture weigh more than the cows grazing
above it. In a catalogue selling composting equipment I read
that two handfuls of healthy soil contain more living organisms
than there are people on the earth. What these beings are and
what they can be doing is difficult to even begin to comprehend,
but it helps to realize that even thought they are many,
they work as one."
- Carol Williams, Bringing a Garden to Life, 1998
"Unfortunately, our affluent society
has also been an effluent society."
- Hubert H. Humphrey
by Kevin Gaston
by Edward O. Wilson
by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela 
by Eric Chivian 
by Andrew Hipp
by Johathan Silvertown
"After all, this is a world of rock
and water and air.
It is elemental. It is not ours."
- Janet Kauffman
If there is magic on the planet, it is contained in the
water.
- Loren Eisley
"In order for something to become
clean,
something else must become dirty."
- Imbesi's Conservation of Filth Law
"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."
- Fritjof Capra
"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
"By 2025, at least 3.5 billion people - about
half the world's populations - will live in areas without enough
water for agriculture, industry, and human needs... Worldwide, water quality
conditions appear to have
degraded in almost all regions with intensive agriculture and in large urban and
industrial areas."
- World Resources Institute
"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
"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and
beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."
- Aldo Leopold
"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."
- Author Unknown
"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
"Nothing can be created out of
nothing.
"Nil posse creari De nilo."
- Lucretius, 99 - 55 B.C.
"Human beings are made up mostly of
water, in roughly the same percentage
as water is to the surface of the earth. Our tissues and membranes, our brains
and hearts, our sweat and tears--all reflect the same recipe for life, in which
efficient use is made of those ingredients available on the surface of the earth.
We are 23 percent carbon, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, with tiny amounts of roughly three dozen other elements. But above
all we are oxygen (61 percent) and hydrogen (10 percent), fused together in the
unique molecular combination known as water, which makes up 71 percent
of the human body."
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
"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
"Making simple matters complex or
complex matters simple are both bad gardening techniques.
Simplifying our relations to things
sometimes allows us to live more complex intellectual and emotional lives. Repetition and diversification
are Nature's formulas.
Simplifying and simplicity are never
simple matters.
The empty garden is already full.
Some animals are always busy cleaning up the dung and the dead.
The happiest gardeners have simply
learned how to relax.
The simplest garden is never simple.
You can sometimes get a handle on life, but it often breaks.
Despite the gardener's best intentions, Nature will improvise.
It takes four seasons to know
one year.
Complexity is closer to the Truth.
Dearly respect the lifestyle of worms.
Diversity, multiplicity, relations,
combinations, mixtures, complexity ...
rarely just one process or one thing. Location, location, location ...
is also true for plants.
Never just One: fruit, a hoe, the
moving Sun."
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling
Onions
"The Mississippi River
carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico."
- Charles Kuralt
"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
by M. Mitchell Waldrop
by Melanie Mitchell
by Steven Strogatz 
by Neil Johnson
by Albert L. Barabasi
"Life emerged, I suggest, not simple, but complex and
whole, and has remained complex and whole ever since—not because of a mysterious élan vital,
but thanks to the simple, profound transformation of dead molecules into an organization by which each molecule's formation is
catalyzed by some other molecule in the organization. The secret of life, the wellspring of reproduction, is not to be
found in the beauty of Watson-Crick pairing, but in the achievement of collective catalytic closure.
So, in another sense, life—complex, whole, emergent—is simple after all, a natural outgrowth of the world in which we live."
- Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, p. 47
"Let us a little permit Nature to take
her own way;
she better understands her own affairs than we."
- Michel De Montaigne
"Soil . . . scoop up a handful of the
magic stuff. Look at it closely.
What wonders it holds as it lies there in your palm. Tiny sharp
grains of sand, little faggots of wood and leaf fiber, infinitely small
round pieces of marble, fragments of shell, specks of black carbon,
a section of vertebrae from some minute creature. And mingling
with it all the dust of countless generations of plants and flowers,
trees, animals and – yes – our own, age-long forgotten forebears,
gardeners of long ago. Can this incredible composition be
the common soil?"
- Stuart Maddox Masters, The Seasons Through
"Nearly 97% of the world's water is
salty or otherwise undrinkable.
Another 2% is locked in ice caps and glaciers. Only 1% can be used
for all agricultural, residential, manufacturing, community and personal needs."
- Drinking
Water Week
"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
Spiritual Ecology: A Guide to Reconnecting with Nature. By Jim Nollman.
Bantam, 1990, 220 pages. VSCL.
"Nature soon takes over if the
gardener is absent."
- Penepole Hobhouse
"If all the world's water were fit into a gallon jug,
the fresh water available for us to use would
equal only about one tablespoon. A corn field of one acre gives off
4,000 gallons of water per day in evaporation. It takes about 6 gallons of water to grow a single serving of lettuce. More than 2,600 gallons is required to produce a single serving of steak."
-
Water Facts
"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
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"Nature is not a place
to visit, it is home."
- Gary Snyder
The Three Laws of Ecology:
First Law: All forms
of life are interdependent and interrelated.
When one is disturbed or harmed, all are disturbed or harmed.
Second Law: The
stability of ecosystems is dependent upon their diversity.
Greater diversity means more stability.
Eliminating some life forms reduces stability of the whole ecosphere.
Third Law: We must
conserve natural resources.
- Adapted from Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace
"Certainly nothing is unnatural that
is not physically impossible."
-
Richard Brinsley Sheriden, 1800
"Most of all one discovers that the
soil does not stay the same,
but, like anything alive, is always changing and telling its own story.
Soil is the substance of transformation."
- Carol Williams
"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
Spiritual Ecology: A Guide to Reconnecting with Nature. By Jim Nollman. Bantam, 1990, Index, Notes, 227 pages. VSCL.
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