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- All systems recycle. The biosphere is a network of continually recycling materials and information in alternating cycles of convergence and divergence. As materials converge or become more concentrated they gain in quality, increasing their potentials to drive useful work in proportion to their concentrations relative to the environment. As their potentials are used, materials diverge, or become more dispersed in the landscape, only to be concentrated again at another time and place. (en)
- A large fraction of the elements composing living matter reside at any instant of time in the world's biota. Because the earthly pool of these elements is limited and the rates of exchange among the various components of the biota are extremely fast with respect to geological time, it is quite evident that much of the same material is being incorporated again and again into different biological forms. This observation gives rise to the notion that, on the average, matter are involved in cycles. (en)
- Pesticides soon spread through everything in the ecosphere-both human technosphere and nonhuman biosphere-returning from the 'out there' of natural environments back into plant, animal, and human bodies situated at the 'in here' of artificial environments with unintended, unanticipated, and unwanted effects. By using zoological, toxicological, epidemiological, and ecological insights, Carson generated a new sense of how 'the environment' might be seen. (en)
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