Daniel B. Botkin > Quotes

“Life has had to deal with environmental change, especially climate change, since the beginning of its existence on Earth. Species adjust or go extinct, and both have happened. For life-forms with our kinds of cells—eukaryotic, the kind with distinct organelles—the average existence of a species is about 1 million years, and, on average, one species goes extinct a year, at least of the species we have named and know, including those we know only from fossil records."

-Dan Botkin, excerpt from THE MOON IN THE NAUTILUS SHELL.”
― Daniel Botkin, Moon in the Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered: From Climate Change to Species Extinction, How Life Persists in an Ever-Changing World

“Yes, the earliest life-forms used the environment as a chemical-waste dump.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Oxygen is a highly reactive element, and if retained within a bacterial cell, it would destroy”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“But we are now free to let go of those ideas because we have new ideas and images that are powerful and well-grounded in science and mathematics. We must release ourselves from the grip of the old image, because it is contrary to facts about nature, and leads us down a path to misguided, destructive, and costly management policies. We must let go of our old, outdated folkways surrounding learning and knowledge; we must learn to sing a new song.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“If we are sowing lots of thoughts about shoes, cars, clothes, computer games, shopping, guns, and very few thoughts about things of the Lord, we will not reap spiritual maturity, spiritual priorities, greater desire for the Lord, or a closer relationship with the Lord. We will reap vanity, shallowness, and even greater spiritual disinterest and distance from the Lord. If we struggle with being uninterested in the things of the Lord, we need to consider that this is something we have actually done to ourselves. If we sow a desire to charm, amuse, or impress our friends, we will not reap relationships based on a selfless, sacrificial, Christ-like interest in our friend's spiritual welfare. We will reap self-serving, exploitive relationships that can actually drag our friends down. This is a life and death matter: what you are sowing in every little conversation that you have. Are you building up, edifying your friends?”
― Botkin

“With this scientific information in hand, the courts
decided that Los Angeles would have to stop the removal
of water that flowed into Mono Lake. By 2008 the lake
still had not recovered to the level required by the courts,
indicating that diversion of water had been undesirable
for the lake and its ecosystem.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet

“But the nineteenth-century idea of beauty can also be regarded as an attempt to grapple with the deeper implications of the new sciences, primarily the idea that the world was held together not by structural symmetries, but by universal rules that from a religious point of view could be interpreted as evidence of the wisdom and power of God.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Judge a man not by his clothes, but by his wife's clothes."
-John Gregory”
― Botkin

“Therefore, we must do our penance; we must suffer for our sins, which, in this case, means living minimally, using as little energy as possible to provide the bare necessities of life and still allowing enough to be creative, to develop more science and technology, and to further exploit (and therefore damage) Earth. Whether he intended it or not, Lovelock’s book can be taken to imply that we shouldn’t have enough energy to be otherwise creative, even to be able to write such a book.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“The failure here is to see the nonrational as only opposed to the rational, and the two as incompatible. A theme of this book is that the two are important to people, deeply so. Accepting the dynamics of nature, which then places us within, and as part of nature, allows these two qualities to exist simultaneously within our minds and spirits.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Thus, early life created the vast iron ore deposits that have been so useful to us since the beginning of the Iron Age, and then the industrial-scientific age.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Thus Leclerc argues that we must drain the marshes and transform the stagnant waters into canals and brooks. We should set fire to “those superannuated forests, which are already half consumed,” and finish the clearing “by destroying with iron what could not be dissipated by fire.” We are admonished to carry out our role in nature, just as every creature is meant to carry out its role. Man is the one who “cuts down the thistle and the bramble, and . . . multiplies the vine and the rose.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Phosphorus is added to
streams and enters the lake. Algae
growth is stimulated, and a dense
layer forms. (c) The algae layer
becomes so dense that the algae at
the bottom die. Bacteria feed on the
dead algae and use up the oxygen.
Finally, fish die from lack”
― Daniel B. Botkin, Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet

“Most important, it is only because of the life-induced major changes in our planet’s atmosphere, oceans, and land that we and all vertebrates can live here.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“As one geological scientist has put it, life is a tectonic force, changing what chemical compounds get made, buried, and even recycled as the tectonic plates push minerals deep into the crust and bring them back up again.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“As I will reveal, actions, policies, laws, and international agreements continue to be developed and enforced based on one or more of the twenty-five myths I will discuss in this book. In the past, when I have pointed out that the practices conform to a specific myth, my colleagues claim they never believed it—that it’s so out-of-date, it isn’t even worth discussing. This is so they can ignore the criticism and tell everybody else to do the same. Then, when nobody is looking, they continue to formulate their policies that are based on the myth, while others continue basic research that assumes and supports the myth. It is against this contradiction between claim and action that I write, hoping independent thinkers will see through the veil placed between claims and actions.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Leclerc wrote that people were put on Earth by God to create “order, subordination and harmony” in nature. He described the unpleasantness and the horror of nature undisturbed—that is, unhusbanded by human beings. “View those melancholy deserts where man has never resided,” he admonished. They are “overrun with briars, thorns, and trees which are deformed, broken and corrupted.” Seeds are “choked and buried in the midst of rubbish and sterility.” In wildness, he said, nature has the appearance of “old age and decrepitude.” Instead of the “beautiful verdure” of managed landscape, there is “nothing but a disordered mass of gross herbage, and of trees loaded with parasitical plants.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“throughout the nation. These are medium-size watersheds, not the entire flow from the nation’s major rivers.
One such watershed is that of the Platte River, a major
tributary of the Missouri River.
The most common herbicides used for growing”
― Daniel B. Botkin, Environmental Science: Earth as a Living Planet

“Biological invasions have (for good reason) gotten a bad name in recent decades; this is because, with our help, species that turn out to be undesirable for us have been transported from their native habitats to others.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“In the Babylonian myth The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh becomes a hero by going into a forest, dark and frightening, and cutting some of it down, admitting light and thereby making it safe.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Nature’s systems are complex in ways we are not used to thinking about and not yet comfortable with.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“An underlying theme of this book is the fact that even today, in this age where we seem to have persuaded ourselves that we have outgrown the need for mythology, most environmental policies, laws, and ideologies are consistent with Judeo-Christian beliefs about nature. This consistency can either be intended by a writer/scientist or inferred through his (inadvertent) use of imagery, metaphor, and analogy.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Within the new understanding of nature that was developing at that time, our role in conservation was active and responsive to nature’s needs, as well as our desires.”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“B. Botkin and E. A. Keller, Environmental Studies: Earth as a Living Planet (Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1987).”
― Daniel B. Botkin, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment: What Many Environmentalists Believe and Why They Are Wrong