Here is a list of powerful quotes about nature and wildlife that inspire me most.
‘Animals are part of every landscape, part of the symphony of interactions that create an ecosystem, but too much of our science is siloed into looking at all these living things in isolation from each other.’
Kristin Ohlsen, Sweet in Tooth and Claw (2022)
‘Emptiness is painful. Attachment to place is something we all feel. It is not about owning the land. It is about loving it, paying close attention, knowing who lives there. Local landscapes mean most to us, wildlife on our doorsteps imbued with personal affection, intertwining our own life with the natural world, which is where it belongs.’
Keggie Carew, Beastly
‘What’s an animal? [Charles Foster] asks. It’s a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes and of which it consists. What’s a human? It’s a rolling conversation with the land from which it comes … All around us are the billions of individual selves acting out their dramas in their individual worlds, connecting to bigger and bigger worlds, to the higgledy-piggledy live jigsaw.’
Keggie Carew, Beastly
‘Every single human is wild born. It’s impossible to remove that mark. Wild living is not about returning to forager status. It’s about relationships with what is wild, about knowing a small part of wild nature and letting it live inside the soul.’
– Craig Foster, 2021. Underwater Wild
‘… human decisions inform the flow of sunlight.’
– Judith D. Schwartz, 2020. The Reindeer Chronicles.
‘I sort of bumbled my way through, and I came to think that understanding ecosystems and what threatens their equilibrium is going to be the next big thing in biological science. To save the environment, we have to find out how to save the ecosystems.’
– Edward O. Wilson, 2019. Quanta Magazine.
‘There is a pattern to the universe and everything in it, and there are knowledge-systems and traditions that follow this pattern to maintain balance … But recent traditions have emerged that break down creation systems like a virus, infecting complex patterns with artificial simplicity, exercising civilising control over what some see as chaos.’
– Tyson Yunkaporta, 2019. Sand Talk.
‘Fifty per cent of the echidna brain is used for some of the hardest kinds of thinking. In humans, it’s not even thirty per cent.’
– Tyson Yunkaporta, 2019. Sand Talk.
‘Like all things that last, it must be a group effort aligned with the patterns of creation discerned from living within a specific landscape.’
– Tyson Yunkaporta, 2019. Sand Talk.
‘It’s often observed that nature–or at least the concept of it–is tangled up in culture. Until there was something that could be set against it–technology, art, consciousness–there was only “nature”, and so no real use for the category.’
– Elizabeth Kolbert, 2021. Under a White Sky
‘I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one’.
– Elizabeth Kolbert, 2021. Under a White Sky
‘And so we’ve created another class of animals. These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back. The term of art for such creatures is “conservation-reliant,” though they might also be called “Stockholm species” for their utter dependence on their persecutors.’
– Elizabeth Kolbert, 2021. Under a White Sky
‘I am convinced that man has suffered in his separation from the soil and from the other living creatures of the world; the evolution of his intellect has outrun his needs as an animal, and as yet he must still, for security, look long at some portion of the earth as it was before he tampered with it.’
― Gavin Maxwell, 1960. Ring of Bright Water.
‘To me there is always something a little stifling in this enveloping green stain, this redundant, almost Victorian drapery over bones that need no blanketing, and were it not for the astringent presence of the sea I should find all that verdure as enervating as an Oxford water-meadow in the depths of summer. Perhaps ‘depraved’ is the right word after all.’
― Gavin Maxwell, 1960. Ring of Bright Water.
‘Early in May comes the recurrent miracle of the elvers’ migration from the sea. There is something deeply awe-inspiring about the sight of any living creatures in incomputable numbers; it stirs, perhaps, some atavistic chord whose note belongs more properly to the distant days when we were a true part of the animal ecology.’
― Gavin Maxwell, 1960. Ring of Bright Water.
‘… his single terrible form controlling by its mere presence the billions of lives between himself and the shore.’
― Gavin Maxwell, 1960. Ring of Bright Water.
‘It’s long been known that if we put machines in charge of simple tasks, humans will, without continuous training, forget how to do them.’
― Matt Burgess, 2021. Artificial Intelligence: how machine learning will shape the next decade.
‘In the modern world, the idea of ubiquitous primal forest – verdant, infinite, unfathomable, prolific – has become, for those yearning for re-enchantment or nostalgic for a richer, deeper kind of nature, the antithesis of the depleted, polluted, parcelled-up landscapes modernity has left us with. It is a vision that continues to be endorsed by science.’
– Isabella Tree, 2020. Wilding.
‘The need to relate to the landscape and to other forms of life … is in our genes. Sever that connection and we are floating in a world where our deepest sense of ourselves is lost.’
– Isabella Tree, 2020. Wilding.
‘… the long-term threat to life on Earth is the exponentially increasing output of heat from the Sun. This is simply the logic of any planet illuminated by a main sequence star. The consequences of solar overheating are already upon us and, but for the regulatory capacity of Gaia, our planet would be moving unstoppably to a state like that of Venus now. What saves us is the continuous and sufficient pump-down of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by land and ocean vegetation.’
– James Lovelock, 2020. Novacene.
‘I think re-wilding and reforestation are worthwhile, but they should occur naturally. I know from personal experience that planting forests is no substitute and can even be harmful.’
– James Lovelock, 2020. Novacene.
‘The thing is, the compromise [on carbon reduction] is between countries and not a compromise with the Earth and that’s really who you need the extension from. When you get an extension, it’s from the teacher. The other students can’t be like, the class decided we’re all getting an extension on this exam. We don’t want to take it until next week. And then the teacher is like, “well that’s cute … you all fail!’
― Hari Kondabolu 2019, The Bugle Podcast
‘The unknowns are too great, the surprises too many, and the complexity of Earth’s real biosphere too vast to fully comprehend.’
– Ruth DeFries, 2020. What Would Nature Do?
‘As birds form flocks and ants carry food to nests using bottom-up principles of communication and collective action, people can solve their own problems.’
– Ruth DeFries, 2020. What Would Nature Do?
‘The idea that one set of rules does not fit all, without a central commanding authority, seems discordant to the human psyche. It runs counter to the popular notion of “scalability”. But evolution’s experience shows that order can emerge without blueprints or control from a top-down authority.’
– Ruth DeFries, 2020. What Would Nature Do?
‘All of your belief systems inside a bubble mean nothing until they are challenged. All of these people who uphold science, your hypothesis means nothing until it’s actually put to the test and the only way of putting it to the test is interacting with people.’
– Desiree Burch, 2021. Tiny Revolutions Podcast.
’Plants and animals do not enter into the story merely as part of the environment, as scenery in the theatre of landscape. They are actors in a play; each has its own character, which needs to be understood. A sad little mark of the 1980s was the ‘area set aside as a haven for wildlife’ attached to any large development–as though there was something called wildlife which would come when summoned, and do what its masters told it.’
– Oliver Rackham, 1994. An Illustrated History of the British Countryside
‘The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves.’
– Carolus Linnaeus, 1735 Systema Naturae
‘If all the matter in the universe except the nematodes were swept away, our world would still be dimly recognizable, and if, as disembodied spirits, we could then investigate it, we should find its mountains, hills, vales, rivers, lakes, and oceans represented by a film of nematodes.’
– Nathan Cobb, 1914. Nematodes and their Relationships
‘As the universal expansion of the Big Bang accelerated, matter precipitated from disequilibrated energy. In its search for equilibrium, matter clumped, signalling further disequilibrium. The only way these clumps can be destroyed is by others, and this role of gradient degradation entrained the evolution of complexity, all the way to living systems.’
– Stanley Salthe, 2003. Ecology and Society.
‘… living things have specialised properties determined by their genes that they have inherited from their ancestors, so, too, do collections of physically interacting particles have specialised properties that come from the past shapes into which they’ve been assembled. By continually getting pushed and knocked around by patterns presented in the environment, matter can undergo a continual exploration of the space of possible shapes whose rhythm and form become matched to those patterns in wats that look an awful lot like living.’
– Jeremy England, 2020. Every Life Is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things
‘I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.’
– Charles Darwin, 1859. On the Origin of Species
‘Each season produces different foods, vitamins and protein levels, and that leads to a varied diet–or it did before processed foods came along. Clues were everywhere. Yellow flowers on the kapok tree meant crocodiles would be laying their eggs. The flowering of the onion lily meant something else. These calendar plants indicated a change in food supply and maybe a time to hunt different animals. And the people knew not to hunt animals to extinction, but moved on to new hunting grounds as the seasons changed.’
– Tom Huth, Mike Keighley, 2012. True Tales of an Outback Guide or Why Kangaroos Go Boing Boing Boing
‘The Sun retired behind a cloud, and the Wind began to blow as hard as it could upon the traveller. But the harder he blew the more closely did the traveller wrap his cloak round him, till at last the Wind had to give in despair. Then the Sun came out and shone in all his glory upon the traveller, who soon found it too hot to walk with his cloak on.’
Aesops Fables
‘Migrants may uniquely alter energy flow, food-web topology and stability, trophic cascades, and the structure and dynamics of (meta-)communities. For example, the inputs of nutrients and energy originating from distant localities by migrants can dramatically increase resource availability, with rippling consequences for productivity at various trophic levels.’
– Bauer and Hoye, 2014. Migratory Animals Couple Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning Worldwide
‘We can hear that life is shaped more by relationships of compatibility and mutual benefit than competition and that sound has shaped life itself. Sound, that mysterious, invisible ephemeral phenomena is the dark matter of evolution.’
– Andrew Skeoch, 2017. Ted-X.
‘The greats never sacrifice the important for the urgent. They handle the immediate problem and still make sure to secure the future.’
Robert “Bobby” Axelrod, 2017. “Billions” (ShowTime)
‘This last chapter … may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur.’
– David Attenborough, 1979. Life on Earth
‘We must understand that life is precious and fleeting. In doing so we will come to recognize the true value of ourselves, our fellow humans and our civilization. The choice before us is not between immortality and eternal darkness, the laws of nature have made that choice. But we do get to choose how long we want to survive. How long do you want the human race to survive? Do we close our minds and seek refuge in the ignorant dark of the cave or do we embrace curiosity and love of knowledge of our fellow humans, of our rare world and of the infinite and wonderful things yet to be known?’
– Orbital, Prof. Brian Cox, 2018. There Will Come a Time
‘Can it be doubted that three-kilogramme brains were once nearly fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?’
– Kurt Vonnegut, 1985. Galápagos
‘These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.’
– Douglas Adams, 1979. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
‘And since this is not a naturally tenable position for a whale, this poor innocent creature had very little time to come to terms with its identity as a whale before it then had to come to terms with not being a whale any more.’
–Douglas Adams, 1979. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
‘Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.’
– George R.R. Martin, 1996. A Game of Thrones.
‘Both sides in the arms race are …confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation.’
– Wiesner and York, 1964. National Security and the Nuclear-Test Ban
‘there is too little recognition that large predatory marine animals can have marked effects on the structure of their communities, and hence on nutrient cycling.’
G. Carleton Ray, 1992. Biodiversity.
‘I am tempted to conclude that a very large fraction of the alleged 35,000 journals now current must be reckoned as merely a distant background noise, and as very far from central or strategic in any of the knitted strips from which the cloth of science is woven.’
– de Solla Price, 1965. Science.
‘Acknowledging the importance of marine life in climate change will not only provide much needed opportunities in climate mitigation, but will simultaneously enhance food security for coastal and island communities, while safeguarding biodiversity and marine ecosystems on a global scale.’
– Sylvia Earle, 2014. Fish Carbon.
‘It is the only physical theory of universal content, which I am convinced, that within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts will never be overthrown.’
– Albert Einstein, 1967. On the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
‘A strawberry is one of the most complex things we know of in the Universe … We might say that the strawberry increases the amount of disorder in the Universe quicker by the very fact of its existence, thus hastening the demise of all of creation. It borrowed order from the Sun, but increased the disorder of the rest of the Universe as a result.’
– Brian Cox & Robin Ince, 2017. How to Build a Universe.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
― William Shakespeare, 1623. As You Like It.
Life
You know it can’t be so easy
But you can’t just leave it
Cause you’re not in control no more
― Doves, 2002. Caught by the River.
‘The system is built to break us down, so sometimes, surviving is a protest in and of itself.’
– James Nokise paraphrasing Teresia Teaiwa, 2020. Tiny Revolutions Podcast.
‘The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long–and you have burned so very, very brightly.’
Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer), 1982. Blade Runner
‘Neither an individual tree nor a species has to prove its evolutionary function or value, nor do human defenders of old growth forests have to prove the value of such to a human economy in order to justify their protection. We are in service to a place. We serve the needs of the land community. We receive from that community such services as food and materials for cloths, shelter, and fuel. We are not stewards of the place managing a piece of property for sustained yield or highest profit in a short time frame. We are attentive to the needs of the whole community. We are students of our place.’
– Bill Devall, 1988. Simple in Means, Rich in ends: Practising Deep Ecology.
‘… when climate change causes mass extinctions, sea creatures are usually hit as hard as land dwellers. Yet there is no evidence of any significant disappearance of oceanic fauna 45,000 years ago. Human involvement can easily explain why the wave of extinction obliterated the terrestrial megafauna of Australia while sparing that of the nearby oceans. Despite its burgeoning navigational abilities, Homo sapiens was still overwhelmingly a terrestrial menace.’
– Yuval Noah Harari, 2011. Sapiens
‘Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.’
– Gerald Durrell, 1958. Encounters with Animals.
