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Ecosystems Quotes

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Ecosystems Quotes

“Similar to living organisms, these living BMaaS (Business Models-as-a-System) have an innate capacity to change creatively within their ecosystems, as they emerge and unfold. Change is expected, organic, and constant.”

“The more numerous we become, the more crowded, the more interconnected, the more demanding of resources, the more invasive of wild places, the more disruptive of richly diverse ecosystems—the closer we stand to the epidemic threshold for any new virus that probes us as a possible route to greater evolutionary success.”

“As soon as you stop thinking about it, the deep can so easily vanish out of mind — more so than that other great distant realm, outer space. The deep has no stars at night to remind us it is there, and no moon shining down. And yet, this hidden place reaches into our daily lives and makes vital things happen without our knowing. The deep, quite simply makes this planet habitable.”

“Overall, then, we will view cas [complex adaptive systems] as systems composed of interacting agents described in terms of rules. These agents adapt by changing their rules as experience accumulates. In cas, a major part of the environment of any given adaptive agent consists of other adaptive agents, so that a portion of any agent's efforts at adaptation is spent adapting to other adaptive agents. This one feature is a major source of the complex temporal patterns that cas generate. To understand cas we must understand these ever-changing patterns.”

“Ecosystems are complex networks. They can be remarkably resilient under stress, but when certain key nodes begin to fail, knock-on effects reverberate through the web of life. This is how mass extinction events unfolded in the past. It’s not the external shock that does it – the meteor or the volcano: it’s the cascade of internal failures that follows. It can be difficult to predict how this kind of thing plays out. Things like tipping points and feedback loops make everything much riskier than it otherwise might be. This is what makes climate breakdown so concerning.”

“Our assaults on the ecosystem are so powerful, so numerous, so finely interconnected, that although the damage they do is clear, it is very difficult to discover how it was done. By which weapon? In whose hand? Are we driving the ecosphere to destruction simply by our growing numbers? By our greedy accumulation of wealth? Or are the machines which we have built to gain this wealth-the magnificent technology that now feeds us out of neat packages, that clothes us in man-made fibers, that surrounds us with new chemical creations-at fault?”

“The production of natural resources in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, stable natural hydrological cycles, fertile soils, a balanced climate and numerous other vital ecosystem services can only be permanently secured through the protection and sustainable use of biological diversity.”

“Indeed, as we begin the twenty-first century, the money and traditional economies are slowly destroying their own support system. Increasing demands of the two economies are surpassing the sustainable yields of the ecosystems that underpin them. For example, one-third of the world's cropland is losing topsoil at a rate that is undermining its long-term productivity, fully half of the world's rangeland is overgrazed and deteriorating into desert, and the world's forests have shrunk by about half since the dawn of agriculture and are continuing to shrink.”

“I think that the environmental movement is wisely moving away from a largely emotion-based argument for the spiritual or intrinsic value of Nature with a capital "N" and evolving toward a very hard-nosed case for the economic value of natural capital, ecosystem services, biodiversity, etc.”

“I think one of the most important investments an organization like TNC (The Nature Conservancy) can make is in helping build local capacity - supporting the growth of a global network of small community-based entities. Help people who live within critical ecosystems help themselves and their neighbors to design a better future relationship between themselves and their natural resources.”

“digital hub (center of our universe) is moving from PC to cloud - PC now just another client alongside iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, ... - Apple is in danger of hanging on to old paradigm too long (innovator's dilemma) - Google and Microsoft are further along on the technology, but haven't quite figured it out yet - tie all of our products together, so we further lock customers into our ecosystem”

“School leadership has been identified as another critical element of student success, and subsequently enough resources and training should be provided to our school principals and administrators to allow them to create a strong ecosystem in our schools and support teachers and parents as well.”

“The wealth of any ecosystem is its perennials. The primal herbivore-predator-disturbance-rest dance is literally the breath and pulse of the earth. Grasses recycle oxygen far more efficiently than trees. The turnover is faster. Grass reaches out and turns solar energy into carbon. Tillage hyper-aerates the soil, burning out carbon. But because a plant creates bilateral symmetry at the soil horizon, it sloughs off root mass when the top gets chopped off.”

“The reductionist measure of yield is to agriculture systems, what GDP is to economic systems. It is time to move from measuring yield of commodities, to health and well-being of ecosystems and communities. Industrial agriculture has its roots in war. Ecological agriculture allows us to make peace with the earth, soil and the society.”

“We are the canaries in the mine. If we go, the last ecosystems go. So does the wisdom of how to sustain resources, live in balance with nature, and create communities based on cooperation, not competition. I think the rest of the world is searching for these values. I know we're here to share them. But we can only share them if we're here.”

“The realizations of anarchist ideas and practices are like sociopolitical ecosystems. Local versions resemble each other, but they are endlessly adaptive and everywhere different to meet their needs in their environments. Anarchism can be adapted to meet the culture, economics, ecology, and politics of various people or communities. That's the beauty of it.”