Quotes from William DeBuys

Continuous economic and demographic growth has a way of turning abundance into scarcity.

Uncounted species--not just charismatic animals like tigers, gorillas, rhinos, and saola but an even larger number of obscure rodents, amphibians, birds, and reptiles--have been pressed to the brink. We hardly know them, and yet within the vastness of the universe, they and the rest of Earth's biota are our only known companions. Without them, our loneliness would stretch to infinity.

Put a horse in an empty meadow, and the meadow becomes animate. Put a saola, even a saola you cannot see, in a forest, and the forest, as though it held a unicorn, acquires an energy that cannot be named. It becomes numinous; it gains the pull of gravity, the weight of water, the float of a feather.