“Ecological design is not so much an individual art practiced by individual designers as it is an ongoing negotiation between a community and the ecology of particular places.”

— David W. Orr

“Ecological awareness will arise only when we combine our rational knowledge with an intuition for the non-linear nature of our environment.”

— Fritjof Capra (The Turning Point)

“… a good ecologist must have a broad synthetic mind, an ability to practice strong inference, and a sense of place or a feel for nature (that is, they must be respectful, alert, observant, and intuitive).”

— Paul K. Dayton (Observation & Ecology : Broadening the Scope of Science to Understand a Complex World)

Unlike other natural systems (e.g., a coral reef or tropical rain forest), the agro-ecosystem always contains a particular “keystone” species. That keystone species is Homo sapiens. It is a species that engineers its own environment far more than any other species in history, a fact that would make ignoring its ecology naïve; nevertheless, its “ecology” involves a structure that no other species has ever had. It has the ability (or is it a need?) to communicate ideas from individual to individual, perpetuated to heights that are magnitudes larger than any other organism in the history of life. That is, our species has language with which it creates structures of culture and society, of economics and politics. As the keystone species in the ecosystem, our special nature becomes part of that ecosystem. The agroecosystem is thus endowed with not only traditional subjects of ecology, but also with the immensely complicating aspects of this particular feature of the keystone species.

— John. H. Vandermeer (Preface, The Ecology of Agroecosystems )