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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index E > Category: Ecology

Ecology Quotes (16 quotes)

A species consists of a group of populations which replace each other geographically or ecologically and of which the neighboring ones integrate or hybridise wherever they are in contact or which are potentially capable of doing so (with one or more of the populations) in those cases where contact is prevented by geographical or ecological barriers.
— Ernst Mayr
'Speciation Phenomena in Birds', The American Naturalist (1940), 74, 256.
Science quotes on:  |  Barrier (4)  |  Evolution (313)  |  Geography (14)  |  Population (34)  |  Species (79)

Both biological and cultural diversity are now severely threatened and working for their preservation is a critical task.
— Murray Gell-Mann
The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventure in the Simple and Compex (1994), 374-375.
Science quotes on:  |  Biology (73)  |  Culture (35)  |  Diversity (29)  |  Preservation (12)  |  Task (24)

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. 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. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture. 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 land yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.
— Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949), viii-ix.
Science quotes on:  |  Commodity (2)  |  Community (21)  |  Conservation (35)  |  Ethic (7)  |  Harvest (5)  |  Land (14)  |  Love (57)  |  Machine (47)  |  Respect (19)

Ecological differentiation is the necessary condition for coexistence.
— Garrett Hardin
'The Competitive Exclusion Principle', Science, 1960,131, 1296.

Ecologically speaking, a spilt tanker load is like sticking a safety pin into an elephant’s foot. The planet barely notices. After the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska the oil company spent billions tidying up the coastline, but it was a waste of money because the waves were cleaning up faster than Exxon could. Environmentalists can never accept the planet’s ability to self-heal.
— Jeremy Clarkson
'Seat Leon Cupra SR1, in The Times (22 Dec 2002)
Science quotes on:  |  Alaska (2)  |  Environmentalist (3)  |  Money (82)  |  Nature (475)  |  Oil Spill (3)

For this knowledge of right living, we have sought a new name... . As theology is the science of religious life, and biology the science of [physical] life ... so let Oekology be henceforth the science of [our] normal lives ... the worthiest of all the applied sciences which teaches the principles on which to found... healthy... and happy life.
— Ellen Swallow Richards
Quoted in Robert Clarke (ed.), Ellen Swallow: The Woman Who Founded Ecology (1973), 120.
Science quotes on:  |  Biology (73)  |  Knowledge (593)  |  Life (379)  |  Name (46)  |  New (77)  |  Nomenclature (93)  |  Religion (101)  |  Theology (16)

I shall collect plants and fossils, and with the best of instruments make astronomic observations. Yet this is not the main purpose of my journey. I shall endeavor to find out how nature's forces act upon one another, and in what manner the geographic environment exerts its influence on animals and plants. In short, I must find out about the harmony in nature.
— Baron Alexander von Humboldt
Letter to Karl Freiesleben (Jun 1799). In Helmut de Terra, Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander van Humboldt 1769-1859 (1955), 87.
Science quotes on:  |  Astronomy (98)  |  Botany (29)  |  Environment (57)  |  Exploration (40)  |  Fossil (69)  |  Geography (14)  |  Instrument (34)  |  Nature (475)  |  Observation (239)  |  Paleontology (14)  |  Plant (84)

If a man walked in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer, but if he spends his whole day as a speculator shearing of those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is estimated as an industrious and enterprising citizen—as if a town had no interest in forests but to cut them down.
— Henry Thoreau
Walden. Quoted in Dr. N Sreedharan, Quotations of Wit and Wisdom (2007), 19.
Science quotes on:  |  Forestry (5)  |  Industry (42)

In New England they once thought blackbirds useless, and mischievous to the corn. They made efforts to destroy them. The consequence was, the blackbirds were diminished; but a kind of worm, which devoured their grass, and which the blackbirds used to feed on, increased prodigiously; then, finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their blackbirds.
— Benjamin Franklin
Letter to Richard Jackson, 5 May 1753. In Albert Henry Smyth, The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (1905), Vol. 3, 135.

Over and over again, we must stress that a healthy ecology is the basis for a healthy economy.
— Claudine Schneider
Quoted in Glenn D. Paige, To Nonviolent Political Science (1993), 126.
Science quotes on:  |  Basis (17)  |  Economy (17)  |  Health (85)

Pervasive depletion and overuse of water supplies, the high capital cost of new large water projects, rising pumping costs and worsening ecological damage call for a shift in the way water is valued, used and managed.
— Sandra Postel
From a study Postel wrote for Worldwatch Institute, quoted in New York Times (22 Sep 1985), 19.
Science quotes on:  |  Capital (6)  |  Cost (11)  |  Dam (2)  |  Damage (7)  |  Depletion (3)  |  High (9)  |  Large (17)  |  Management (4)  |  Pervasive (2)  |  Project (4)  |  Pump (4)  |  Shift (7)  |  Supply (11)  |  Use (41)  |  Value (50)  |  Water (99)

Since my first discussions of ecological problems with Professor John Day around 1950 and since reading Konrad Lorenz's "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 what the thinkers of the so-called Age of Enlightenment tell us about the nature of man, and with what the formal religions and doctrinaire political theorists tell us about the same subject.
— Allan MacLeod Cormack
'Autobiography of Allan M. Cormack,' Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures 1979, editted by Wilhelm Odelberg.
Science quotes on:  |  Animal (123)  |  Doctrine (25)  |  Formal (2)  |  Interest (58)  |  Men (12)  |  Nature Of Man (4)  |  Problem (149)  |  Religion (101)  |  Study (117)  |  Teach (14)

The interactions of man with his environment are so complex that only an ecological approach to nutrition permits an understanding of the whole spectrum of factors determining the nutritional problems that exist in human societies.
— George H. Beaton
World Health Organization, Nutrition in Preventive Medicine, 13. From http://whqlibdoc.who.int/monograph/WHO_MONO_62_(chp1).pdf
Science quotes on:  |  Environment (57)  |  Nutrition (9)

The theory here developed is that mega-evolution normally occurs among small populations that become preadaptive and evolve continuously (without saltation, but at exceptionally rapid rates) to radically different ecological positions. The typical pattern involved is probably this: A large population is fragmented into numerous small isolated lines of descent. Within these, inadaptive differentiation and random fixation of mutations occur. Among many such inadaptive lines one or a few are preadaptive, i.e., some of their characters tend to fit them for available ecological stations quite different from those occupied by their immediate ancestors. Such groups are subjected to strong selection pressure and evolve rapidly in the further direction of adaptation to the new status. The very few lines that successfully achieve this perfected adaptation then become abundant and expand widely, at the same time becoming differentiated and specialized on lower levels within the broad new ecological zone.
— George Gaylord Simpson
Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944), 123.
Science quotes on:  |  Abundance (8)  |  Achievement (59)  |  Adaptation (24)  |  Ancestor (12)  |  Character (30)  |  Descent (7)  |  Development (97)  |  Difference (117)  |  Direction (21)  |  Evolution (313)  |  Expansion (14)  |  Fragment (11)  |  Group (18)  |  Isolation (16)  |  Level (14)  |  Mutation (11)  |  Numerous (5)  |  Occupation (26)  |  Pattern (16)  |  Perfection (35)  |  Population (34)  |  Position (17)  |  Pressure (17)  |  Probability (53)  |  Rapidity (13)  |  Selection (13)  |  Small (26)  |  Specialization (8)  |  Station (5)  |  Status (4)  |  Theory (319)  |  Typical (5)  |  Zone (2)

The theory of evolution by natural selection is an ecological theory—founded on ecological observation by perhaps the greatest of all ecologists. It has been adopted by and brought up by the science of genetics, and ecologists, being modest people, are apt to forget their distinguished parenthood.
— John L. Harper
'A Darwinian Approach to Plant Ecology', Journal of Ecology, 1967, 55, 247.
Science quotes on:  |  Evolution (313)  |  Genetics (75)  |  Natural Selection (52)

The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. What is happening to the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil will affect us all.
— Edward O. Wilson
Quoted in Jamie Murphy and Andrea Dorfman, 'The Quiet Apocalypse,' Time (13 Oct 1986).
Science quotes on:  |  Ant (8)  |  Biology (73)  |  Bird (43)  |  Economics (18)  |  Knowledge (593)  |  Rain Forest (4)  |  Tree (66)



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