In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

While ants exist in just the right numbers for the rest of the living world, humans have become too numerous. If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plants and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land ecosystems almost everywhere.

The worst thing that will probably happen-in fact is already well underway-is not energy depletion, economic collapse, conventional war, or the expansion of totalitarian governments. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired in a few generations. The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

One difference between ants and humans is that while ants send their old women off to war, humans send their young men.

[Bacteria are the] dark matter of the biological world [with 4 million mostly unknown species in a ton of soil].

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

A society that condemns homosexuality harms itself. (254)