QuoteProject
The most irrevocable of [natures] laws says that a species cannot occupy a niche that appropriates all resources--there has to be some sharing. Any species that ignores this law winds up destroying its community to support its own expansion.
Janine Benyus
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote emphasizes the importance of sharing resources within an ecosystem to ensure survival and balance.

Janine Benyus highlights a fundamental ecological principle that no species can monopolize resources without consequences. When a species fails to acknowledge the necessity of sharing, it ultimately harms not only its own existence but also the health of the entire community, leading to ecological collapse.

Themes

SpeciesResourcesSharingCommunityEcosystem

In practice

Example use cases

During a lecture on ecology, I quoted, 'The most irrevocable of [natures] laws says that a species cannot occupy a niche that appropriates all resources--there has to be some sharing.'

More from Janine Benyus

Biologically inspired materials could revolutionize materials science. People looking at spider silk and abalone shells are looking for new ways to make materials better, cheaper, and with less toxic byproducts.
Janine BenyusRead
Everyone is trying to jump on the biomimic bandwagon. But a cork floor is not biomimicry. Neither is using bacteria to clean water.
Janine BenyusRead
For a long time we have thought we were better than the living world, and now some of us tend to think we are worse, that everything we touch turns to soot. But neither perspective is healthy. We have to remember how it feels to have equal standing in the world, to be "between the mountain and the ant . . . part and parcel of creations," as the Iroquois traditionalist Oren Lyons says.
Janine BenyusRead
The truth is, natural organisms have managed to do everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet or mortgaging the future.
Janine BenyusRead
Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that's already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn.
Janine BenyusRead
Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature. In a society accustomed to dominating or 'improving' nature, this respectful imitation is a radically new approach, a revolution really. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her.
Janine BenyusRead

Similar quotes

The most important thing for people to know about the governance of the Arctic is that we have a chance now to act to maintain the integrity of the system or to lose it. To lose it means that we will dismember the vital systems that make the Arctic work. It's not just a cost to the people who live there. It's a cost to all people everywhere.
Sylvia EarleRead
A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering.
William S. BurroughsRead
The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen.
Alice WalkerRead
Nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see.
Frank Lloyd WrightRead
A baby nursing at a mother's breast... is an undeniable affirmation of our rootedness in nature.
David SuzukiRead
Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying, everything is absorbed through weather and the sea, and the moon swam back, its rays all silvered, and time and again the darkness would be broken by the crash of a wave, and every day on the balcony of the sea, wings open, fire is born, and everything is blue again like morning.
Pablo NerudaRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.

Quote by Janine Benyus | QuoteProject