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ECOSYSTEM

* 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.
~ Kofi Annan

* 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.
-- Maude Barlow

* The destruction of aquatic ecosystem health, and the increasing water scarcity, are in my opinion the most pressing environmental problems facing human kind.
-- Maude Barlow

"Each one [of the Earth's 5 million invertebrate species] plays a role in its ecosystem. It's like we're tearing the cogs out of a great machine. The machine might work after you tear out ten cogs, but what happens when you tear out a hundred?"
— Scott Black

* you cannot tackle hunger, disease, and poverty unless you can also provide people with a healthy ecosystem in which their economies can grow.
-- Gro Harlem Brundtland

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

"The great ecosystems are like complex tapestries - a million complicated threads, interwoven, make up the whole picture. Nature can cope with small rents in the fabric; it can even, after a time, cope with major disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. What nature cannot cope with is the steady undermining of its fabric by the activities of man."
~ Gerald Durrell

* We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth. As we learn how we fit into the greater scheme of things, and begin to understand how the system works, we can plan ahead, we can use the resources responsibly, to show some respect for this inheritance that goes back 4.6 billion years.
~ Sylvia Earle

* We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth.
~ Sylvia Earle

"We consider species to be like a brick in the foundation of a building. You can probably lose one or two or a dozen bricks and still have a standing house. But by the time you've lost 20 per cent of species, you're going to destabilize the entire structure. That's the way ecosystems work."
- Donald Falk

"The agriculture we seek will act like an ecosystem, feature material recycling and run on the contemporary sunlight of our star."
-- Wes Jackson

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.
-- David Korten

"I used to think of the environment as trees and blue sky. Then I learned that for some people, the environment is gangs and concrete. All the issues that we face are connected. Worldwide, ecosystems are being destroyed, and indigenous peoples are losing their homelands and their entire way of life. Three out of every five African-Americans and Latinos in the US lives in a community with a toxic waste site. As long as pollution is being produced, it's going to go somewhere, and as long as there are marginalized communities where land is cheaper and the people don't have the time or the money to fight back, polluters will have a place to deposit toxins. As long as people and the planet are being exploited, and billions of dollars are being made precisely because laborers and the environment are being abused and used up, there will be children going hungry and ecological destruction. As long as war and violence are in our hearts and our streets as well as in our nations, as long as corporate greed and unsustainable consumption are at the forefront of our economies, no child will be born into a truly safe, peaceful or loving world."
~ Ocean Robbins

"Biological diversity is being lost at a rate unequalled since the appearance of modern ecosystems more than 40 million years ago. A quarter of all mammals are threatened with extinction and nearly 70% of the world’s fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted."
-- Royal Society
Each species on our planet plays a role in the healthy functioning of natural ecosystems, on which humans depend.
- William H. Schlesinger
Even if we act immediately, the world is doomed to lose many of its animal and plant species and this inturn will reduce the ability of ecosystems to deliver vital services to human populations. The Red List gives all of us a practical tool for raising awareness of the biodiversity crisis and for forging new partnerships within the international community.
-- Achim Steiner, IUCN Director General
Any progress achieved in addressing the goals of poverty and hunger eradication, improved health, and environmental protection is unlikely to be sustained if most of the ecosystem services on which humanity relies continues to be degraded.
-- UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
"To halt the decline of an ecosystem, it is necessary to think like an ecosystem."
~ Douglas P. Wheeler

 

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