Quotes About Conservation

the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them. No-one

It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.

Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.

Tarka the otter

dried cow pies—known euphemistically and rather charmingly as "surface coal.

Farther west, Michigan's seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine—170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived—shrank by 95 percent in just a century.

If the global temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a time to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.

the beaver and bear nearly

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There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals—220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears.

Today the National Park Service employs a more casual approach to endangering wildlife: neglect. It spends almost nothing—less than 3 percent of its budget—on research of any type, which is why no one knows how many mussels are extinct or even why they are going extinct.

No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick—with a folded newspaper, I'd almost bet.

la estrategia más eficaz para luchar contra el cambio climático consiste en dejar de talar tantos árboles que ya existen.

For the most part, you can get trees to grow only in places where they've already grown, so planting them could help undo the damage caused by deforestation. But there's no practical way to plant enough of them to deal with the problems caused by burning fossil fuels. The most effective tree-related strategy for climate change is to stop cutting down so many of the trees we already have.

The most effective tree-related strategy for climate change is to stop cutting down so many of the trees we already have.

In Indonesia, on the other hand, forests are being cut down to make way for palm trees, which provide the palm oil you'll find in everything from movie-theater popcorn to shampoo. It's one of the main reasons why the country is the world's fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

New Rule: For at least the next generation, the Crocodile Hunter clan has to leave nature alone. This week, the late Steve Irwin's youngest son was bitten by a boa constrictor. Authorities don't know exactly what went wrong, but they think the accident might have happened when a bunch of idiots let a four-year-old fuck around with a giant snake.

Most archivists don't like surprises. That's why we work in the past.

The rain forests of the Congo Basin contained so much water that they caused their own weather system, and were known as the "Lungs of Africa.

There are some scientists who frown upon such practices, believing that nature should run its course," Jane wrote in an early chapter of The Chimpanzees of Gombe, a scholarly compilation of her first twenty-six years of work. "It seems to me, however, that humans have already interfered to such a major extent, usually in a very negative way . . . with so many animals in so many places that a certain amount of positive interference is desirable.

We kill 100 million [sharks] yearly. By 2050 we will have filled the sea with more plastics than fish.

You are 50 percent less likely to see a bumblebee than you were in 1974. Butterfly populations have decreased, according to one estimate, by 33 percent in the last twenty years. Three billion birds have disappeared from North American skies in the past five decades. Audubon's Birds and Climate Change Report warns that half of all birds on our continent are at risk

Bears are meant for long lives. . . . they can live more than 30 years. Such a long lifespan testifies to the value of knowledge carefully accumulated and considered.

A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you look at the world's mammals by weight, 96 percent of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.