Quotes About Conservation

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

Our most modern sin is that we do not love the world enough. We have exiled the holy from this realm so we can turn its mountains into money.

I'm concerned about the ocean and the environment. And I love whales.

I love zoo sanctuaries.

Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings. But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.

Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state's farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.)

The Forest Service is truly an extraordinary institution. A lot of people, seeing that word forest in the title, assume it has something to do with looking after trees. In fact, no—though that was the original plan.

The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct.

Shenandoah National Park is lovely. It is possibly the most wonderful national park I have ever been in, and, considering the impossible and conflicting demands put on it, it is extremely well run. Almost at once it became my favorite part of the Appalachian Trail.

In fact, mostly what the Forest Service does is build roads.

A native of the southern United States, the warbler was famous for its unusually lovely song, but its population numbers, never robust, gradually dwindled until by the 1930s the warbler vanished altogether and went unseen for many years. Then, in 1939, by happy coincidence two separate birding enthusiasts, in widely separated locations, came across lone survivors just two days apart. They both shot the birds.

22 million tonnes of such unwanted fish are dumped back in the sea each year, mostly in the form of corpses.

Britain has 450,000 listed buildings, 20,000 scheduled ancient monuments, twenty-six World Heritage Sites, 1,624 registered parks and gardens (that is, gardens and parks of historic significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects.

Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else.

Orange roughy, a sluggish but delicious ocean fish, were caught in vast numbers before marine biologists realized how desperately susceptible to extinction they were.

Many fishermen "fin" sharks—that is, slice their fins off, then dump them back into the water to die.

The World Wildlife Fund estimated in 1994 that the number of sharks killed each year was between 40 million and 70 million. As

As the economist Herman Daly once put it: "The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.

report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of

can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean—but if you are not in a hurry it is marvellously efficient. Perhaps

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In

Before this dumping was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites—almost fifty thousand of them in the Fallarones alone.

pair of Stephens Island wrens, which were found only on a small, isolated island in New Zealand's Cook Strait. All were killed by a lighthouse keeper's cat.

Peale was a lover of birds, and yet did not hesitate to kill them in large numbers for no better reason than that it interested him to do so.