Quotes About Conservation

Not that I subscribe to the utilitarian view that plants are only good for what we can get out of them—it should be enough to add another beautiful (or even plain) item to nature's inventory. We need to know what there is in the world for us to look after, regardless of its potential use.

How many wild animals can be sustainably killed for the many millions of pets that people keep?

Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.

Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics.

To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

The best and easiest way to get a forest to return to any plot of cleared land is to do nothing—nothing at all, and do it for less time than you might think.

The most wondrous products of four billion years of life need help.

someone to speak for the trees." She

Extinction) Twelve million or more species, less than a tenth of them counted. And half of them will snuff out in her lifetime.

If you want to maximize the net present value of a forest for its current owners and deliver the most wood in the shortest time, then yes: cut the old growth and plant straight-rowed replacement plantations, which you'll be able to harvest a few more times. But if you want next century's soil, if you want pure water, if you want variety and health, if you want stabilizers and services we can't even measure, then be patient and let the forest give slowly.

Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together. Twice as much carbon in the falling forests than in all the atmosphere. But that's for another trial.

She looks for the towering black locust, with its fragrant racemes and pea-pod seeds, the tree that stunned Muir into becoming a naturalist. But the world-changing locust was cut down twelve years before.

Too many species to count. Reefs bleach and wetlands dry. Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see.

If most of the area of habitat is destroyed, and a fraction of the area is saved as a reserve, the reserve will initially contain more species than it can hold at equilibrium. The excess will gradually go extinct. The smaller the reserve, the higher will be the extinction rates…. Different species require different minimum areas to have a reasonable chance of survival.

The world may need fixing, but it's worth preserving.

I will not have a sea creature destroyed, if I can help it. And I can help it.

You save the whales and shoot the people, huh?

No tienen que complacer los deseos de todos los grupitos que se oponen al progreso porque quieren proteger las zonas donde anida la tetuda curruca moteada…

Careful readers will note that the guy who "won" was hardly a shining example of birding ethics. What kind of person would pay thousands of dollars for flights and car rentals to chase a rare bird and then try to avoid paying a couple of bucks to get into a state park? Real birders carry their share, do their part, try to support the resource that supports birding.

We have turned away from the natural world. Instead, it's all about money and power.

It is also vital that our relationship with nature and the environment be included in our education systems. This is not longer something cute or nice to do; it is now a singular imperative.

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.

How can you care about the image of a landscape, when you show by your deeds that you don't care for the landscape itself?

Ultimately, the wolves themselves made the reintroduction work.