The most irrevocable of [natures] laws says that a species cannot occupy a niche that appropriates all resources--there has to be some sharing. Any species that ignores this law winds up destroying its community to support its own expansion.

The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.

Organisms dont think of CO2 as a poison. Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think of it as a building block.

Biomimicry is basically taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that's already solved that challenge, and literally trying to emulate what you learn.

For a long time we have thought we were better than the living world, and now some of us tend to think we are worse, that everything we touch turns to soot. But neither perspective is healthy. We have to remember how it feels to have equal standing in the world, to be "between the mountain and the ant . . . part and parcel of creations," as the Iroquois traditionalist Oren Lyons says.

A solitary American monk named Thomas Berry writes that in our relationship to nature, we have been autistic for centuries. Wrapped tightly in our own version of knowledge, we have been unreceptive to the wisdom of the natural world. To tune in again, to have the "spontaneous environmental rapport" that characterized our ancestors, will take doing something that is perfectly delightful: reimmersing ourselves in the natural world.

Conserving habitats is a wellspring for the next industrial revolution.