Quotes About Conservation

During the last days of his governorship, Clinton Tyree had lobbied for a somewhat tougher law. His version would have required anyone who killed a manatee to immediately forfeit his boat (no matter how luxurious) and pay a ten-thousand dollar fine or go to jail for forty-five days. The Tyree Amendment would have also required the manatee killer to bury the dead animal himself, at a public ceremony. Not surprisingly, the governor's proposal was quietly rejected.

In other words, we saved an animal from extinction just so we could start killing it again. How messed up is that?

If wildlife cannot exist there will be poor quality for human life. A better world for wildlife means a better world for human life.

When a poacher kills an elephant, he doesn't just kill the elephant who dies. The family may lose the crucial memory of their elder matriarch, who knew where to travel during the very toughest years of drought to reach the food and water that would allow them to continue living. Thus one bullet may, years later, bring more deaths.

Shrinking forests, melting ice, plowed grasslands, raging fires, drying rivers, and dying corals — diminished of all the major habitats, proxy for all who live therein, means that the numbers of free-living animals are the lowest ever, and mostly falling, across the board. It means something acutely awful, I think: that the human species has made itself incompatible with the rest of Life on Earth.

This litany of loss […] is the profile of a species going extinct. In a generation or two the memory of wild Africa will be lost as utterly as an American prairie of head high wild flowers swirled by bison, darkened by wild pigeons, bordered by towering forests of chestnuts, as it all was mere moments ago.

If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go

Los seres humanos sólo pueden sobrevivir matando otros organismos. Pero podemos realizar una compensación ecológica cultivando otros organismos; estimulando la plantación de bosques, impidiendo la matanza al por mayor de organismos como las ballenas y la focas, organismos que pueden tener valor comercial o industrial, como asimismo declarando fuera de la ley la caza injustificada, y haciendo que el medio ambiente de la Tierra sea más agradable para todos sus habitantes.

It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth.

Como es lógico, existe un ritmo constante y básico de extinciones. En nuestra época, las especies se extinguen cada año a consecuencia de las actividades humanas: la urbanización, la caza, la contaminación industrial o la destrucción de los bosques tropicales.

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.

Birds know, better than humans, not to spoil the nest.

What once was and was good ought not to be cast aside.

from nature what they needed to improve their lives without regard for how it might damage nature herself

But there were times when you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history. But

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.

Our public lands - whether a national park or monument, wildlife refuge, forest or prairie - make each one of us land-rich. It is our inheritance as citizens of a country called America.

This is what we can promise the future: a legacy of care. That we will be good stewards and not take too much or give back too little, that we will recognize wild nature for what it is, in all its magnificent and complex history - an unfathomable wealth that should be consciously saved, not ruthlessly spent.

The legacy of the Wilderness Act is a legacy of care. It is the act of loving beyond ourselves, beyond our own species, beyond our own time. To honor wildlands and wild lives that we may never see, much less understand, is to acknowledge the world does not revolve around us. The Wilderness Act is an act of respect that protects the land and ourselves from our own annihilation.

Our national parks are memory palaces where our personal histories reside.

How we treat our land, how we build upon it, how we act toward our air and water, in the long run, will tell what kind of people we really are. -Laurance S. Rockefeller

Wilderness is not a place of privilege, but rather a place of probity, where the evolutionary processes of life are free to continue.

This is a landscape that should not be sold.