A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic. |
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition. |
Colonies with lower relatedness among the workers often have higher growth and reproduction rates than those with higher relatedness, |
Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself. |
Each species is a masterpiece, a creation assembled with extreme care and genius. |
Earth is a little-known planet. We have little appreciation for what we're doing. ... We are flying blind, |
Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart. |
For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths. |
Giants exist as a state of mind. They are defined not as an absolute measurement but as a proportionality. . . . So giants can be real, even if adults do not choose to classify them as such. |
He was above all an observer of life — that's how I see Darwin. |
Here we are at the rheas. That's now known as Darwin's rhea, and it lived about 1,000 kilometers south of the larger variety. |
Human activity equals a decline of the rest of life on earth, |
Human beings live -- literally live, as if life is equated with the mind -- by symbols, particularly words, because the brain is constructed to process information almost exclusively in their terms. |
Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life. |
Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built. |