Human Ecology Quotes

“We never were separate from nature and never will be, but the dominant culture on earth has long imagined itself to be apart from nature and destined one day to transcend it. We have lived in a mythology of separation.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“Your mother should have treated him better, he was her patron, after all. Just like the parasite that is humanity should treat this planet better.”
― Jo Nesbø, Killing Moon

“The bald unpalatable fact is emphasized that the Highlands and Islands are largely a devastated terrain, and that any policy which ignores this fact cannot hope to achieve rehabilitation.”
― Frank Fraser Darling, West Highland Survey: An Essay in Human Ecology

“It took me more than a decade to work my way through the landscape. I owe my liberation from it to the work of geographer David Lowenthal and social critic Marshall McLuhan. Their writing convinced me that the world-as-picture was, on one hand, geared to the superficiality of taste and, on the other, an outcome of a Renaissance mathematical perspective that tended to separate rather than join. Walter Ong's essay "The World as View and the World as Event" convinced me that this distinction between the visual and the tactile was more than ideological. The landscape was an inadequate nexus. It was only a twist in the idea of the co-option of the earth. Indeed, such ideas depended as much on unconscious perception as on intellectual or artistic formulations. I began to feel that something still more biogenic, yet common to humankind, which yet might take partic­ular social or aesthetic expression, held the key to an adequate human ecology.

“Over the next decade I read anthropology and child psychology. During that time a meeting of anthropologists took place in Chicago that resulted in the publication of Man the Hunter. I began to think that the appropriate model for human society in its earth habitat may have existed for several million years. If Claude Levi-Strauss were to be believed, nothing had been gained by the onset of civilization except technical mastery, while what had been lost or distorted was a way of interpreting in which nature was an unlimited but essential poetic and intellectual instrument in the achieve­ment of human self-consciousness, both in evolution and in every genera­ tion and individual human life. I knew such an idea would be ridiculed as a throwback to the discredited figure of the noble savage, but when it was considered in light of Erik Erikson's concept of individual development as an identity-shaping sequence I found it irresistible.”
― Paul Shepard