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Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index B > Category: Balance Of Nature

Balance Of Nature Quotes (7 quotes)

Any form of balance of nature is purely a human construct, not something that is empirically real.
From interview (16 Jul 2009) on rorotoko.com about his book The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth (2009).
Science quotes on:  |  Construct (129)  |  Empirical (58)  |  Human (1512)  |  Purely (111)  |  Real (159)

I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.… I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.
In 'Thinking Like a Mountain', A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949, 1987), 130, 132.
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The balance of nature is not a status quo; it is fluid, ever shifting, in a constant state of adjustment.
In Silent Spring (1962), 246.
Science quotes on:  |  Adjustment (21)  |  Balance (82)  |  Constant (148)  |  Fluid (54)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Shift (45)  |  State (505)  |  Status (35)  |  Status Quo (5)

The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.
In 'Thinking Like a Mountain', A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949, 1987), 132.
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The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.
Saturday Review (8 Jun 1963).
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The notion that the “balance of nature” is delicately poised and easily upset is nonsense. Nature is extraordinarily tough and resilient, interlaced with checks and balances, with an astonishing capacity for recovering from disturbances in equilibrium. The formula for survival is not power; it is symbiosis.
In Encounter (Mar 1976), 16. As quoted and cited in Alan Lindsay Mackay , A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2nd Ed., 1991), 13.
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The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature had established between her organized and her inorganic creations; and she avenges herself upon the intruder, by letting loose upon her defaced provinces destructive energies hitherto kept in check by organic forces destined to be his best auxiliaries, but which he has unwisely dispersed and driven from the field of action. When the forest is gone, the great reservoir of moisture stored up in its vegetable mould is evaporated, and returns only in deluges of rain to wash away the parched dust into which that mould has been converted. The well-wooded and humid hills are turned to ridges of dry rock, which encumbers the low grounds and chokes the watercourses with its debris, and–except in countries favored with an equable distribution of rain through the seasons, and a moderate and regular inclination of surface–the whole earth, unless rescued by human art from the physical degradation to which it tends, becomes an assemblage of bald mountains, of barren, turfless hills, and of swampy and malarious plains. There are parts of Asia Minor, of Northern Africa, of Greece, and even of Alpine Europe, where the operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon; and though, within that brief space of time which we call “the historical period,” they are known to have been covered with luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and fertile meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be reclaimable by man, nor can they become again fitted for human use, except through great geological changes, or other mysterious influences or agencies of which we have no present knowledge, and over which we have no prospective control. The earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence, and of like duration with that through which traces of that crime and that improvidence extend, would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.
Man and Nature, (1864), 42-3.
Science quotes on:  |  Action (342)  |  Africa (38)  |  Art (680)  |  Assemblage (17)  |  Balance (82)  |  Barbarism (8)  |  Barren (33)  |  Become (821)  |  Becoming (96)  |  Best (467)  |  Brief (37)  |  Call (781)  |  Cause (561)  |  Change (639)  |  Complete (209)  |  Condition (362)  |  Conservation (187)  |  Control (182)  |  Creation (350)  |  Crime (39)  |  Degradation (18)  |  Deluge (14)  |  Destined (42)  |  Destroy (189)  |  Destruction (135)  |  Distribution (51)  |  Dry (65)  |  Dust (68)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Era (51)  |  Excess (23)  |  Extend (129)  |  Extinction (80)  |  Face (214)  |  Favor (69)  |  Fertile (30)  |  Field (378)  |  Force (497)  |  Forest (161)  |  Great (1610)  |  Ground (222)  |  Historical (70)  |  Home (184)  |  Human (1512)  |  Impoverished (3)  |  Inclination (36)  |  Influence (231)  |  Inhabitant (50)  |  Knowledge (1647)  |  Known (453)  |  Low (86)  |  Man (2252)  |  Meadow (21)  |  Moisture (21)  |  Mold (37)  |  Moon (252)  |  Mountain (202)  |  Mysterious (83)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Operation (221)  |  Organic (161)  |  Other (2233)  |  Period (200)  |  Physical (518)  |  Present (630)  |  Productivity (23)  |  Prospective (7)  |  Province (37)  |  Rain (70)  |  Ravage (7)  |  Reduce (100)  |  Regular (48)  |  Reservoir (9)  |  Return (133)  |  Rock (176)  |  Season (47)  |  Set (400)  |  Shattered (8)  |  Space (523)  |  Species (435)  |  Surface (223)  |  Tend (124)  |  Threaten (33)  |  Through (846)  |  Time (1911)  |  Trace (109)  |  Turn (454)  |  Use (771)  |  Vegetable (49)  |  Verdant (3)  |  Wash (23)  |  Whole (756)  |  Wood (97)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
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- 90 -
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Ibn Khaldun
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Frederick Banting
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- 80 -
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- 70 -
Samuel Morse
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- 60 -
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Martin Fischer
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- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
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Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
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Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
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- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
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Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
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Francis Crick
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Francis Bacon
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- 10 -
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