By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.
Barry CommonerRead
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote highlights the interconnectedness of all elements in the ecosystem.
Barry Commoner's quote emphasizes the complexity and interdependence of ecological systems, suggesting that every element within an ecosystem—a species, a plant, or even human beings—affects one another. This understanding is foundational for ecological science and advocates for a holistic view of environmental conservation, urging us to recognize our role and responsibility in maintaining these delicate relationships.
Themes
EcologyInterconnectednessEnvironmentEcosystemNature
In practice
Example use cases
During a presentation on environmental protection, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of conservation efforts.
More from Barry Commoner
All quotes →Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline - which prevented it from entering the environment.
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We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
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What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point - the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.
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Despite the dazzling successes of modern technology and the unprecedented power of modern military systems, they suffer from a common and catastrophic fault. While providing us with a bountiful supply of food, with great industrial plants, with high-speed transportation, and with military weapons of unprecedented power, they threaten our very survival.
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Sooner or later, _x000D_ wittingly or unwittingly, _x000D_ we must pay _x000D_ for every intrusion _x000D_ on the natural environment.
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If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.
Thomas BerryRead
When you drink in nature through your senses, you deepen your awareness of the great silent intelligence flowing through all things. You nourish your mind, body, and spirit as you connect to the divine love of Being.
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[...] endless action and reaction. Those beautifully rounded pebbles which you gather on the sand and which you hold in your hand and marvel at their exceeding smoothness, were chiseled into their varies and graceful forms by the ceaseless action of countless waves. Nature is herself a great worker and never tolerates, without certain rebuke, any contradiction to her wise example. Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death.
Frederick DouglassRead
Is it too late to prevent us from self-destructing? No, for we have the capacity to design our own future, to take a lesson from living things around us and bring our values and actions in line with ecological necessity. But we must first realize that ecological and social and economic issues are all deeply intertwined. There can be no solution to one without a solution to the others.
Jean-Michel CousteauRead
When anxious, uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everthing in me that is bewildered and confused.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead