“We have decommissioned natural selection and must now look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become.”

This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.

If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.

Our brain is mapping the world. Often that map is distorted, but it’s a map with constant immediate sensory input.

If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. When lost, they will find another way.

In some ways, I had a traditional ‘old South’ upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the ‘environmentalist’ view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

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.

The education of women is the best way to save the environment.

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.

Every kid has a bug period… I never grew out of mine.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.

It’s always been a great survival value for people to believe they belong to a superior tribe. That’s just in human relationships.

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They’re the cemetery workers.