Quotes About Conservation

Anybody who thinks there can be limitless growth in a static, limited environment is either mad or an economist.

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

The greater the biodiversity, the more secure will be all life on Earth,

The natural world is fading. The evidence is all around. It has happened during my lifetime. I have seen it with my own eyes. It will lead to our destruction.

Since I started filming in the 1950s, on average, wild animal populations have more than halved. I look at these images now and I realize that, although as a young man I felt I was out there in the wild experiencing the untouched natural world... it was an illusion. Those forests and plains and seas were already emptying.

We can't cut down rainforests forever. And anything that we can't do forever is by definition, unsustainable. If we do things that are unsustainable, the damage accumulates, ultimately, to a point where the whole system collapses. No ecosystem, not matter how big, is secure. Even one as vast as the ocean.

No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experiened".

Ingen ville att djur skulle utrotas. Människor började bry sig om naturen när de blev mer medvetna om den. Och televisionen bidrog till det, världen över.

a place does not have to be pristine to be worthy of protection and care... If people are open and observant, wilderness is all around us.

En la actual polémica, mientras nuestra sociedad se detiene en una ignorancia mojigata, haríamos bien en recordar lo mucho que hay en juego: la salud de los hambrientos y la conservación de nuestro legado más precioso, el medio ambiente.

it would take the Earth more than a thousand years to recover from the damage we have already done,

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.

Overfishing of the past fifty years has driven the population of large fish down by ninety percent. And climate change is acidifying and warming the waters, lessening its ability to hold oxygen, suffocating marine life. We are rapidly killing the seas beyond the ability to heal.

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, thought you know that it probably will not be.

One conservation worker we met said he sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male didn't actively repel the female, which is the sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only in discotheques.

just wading into Africa and telling the local people that they mustn't do to their wildlife what we've done to ours, and that we are there to make sure they don't, is an attitude that, to say the least, needs a little refining.

There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.

Richard had trained in the Philippines, working to save the Philippines' monkey-eating eagle, a wildly improbable-looking piece of flying hardware that you would more readily expect to see coming into land on an aircraft

We have taken forward steps in learning that wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day," Roosevelt said, "but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.

I think we're simply going to run out of Nature before we have a chance to destroy it.

In Canada, when we speak of water, we're speaking of ourselves. Canadians are known to be unextravagant, and one explanation of this might be that we know that wasted water means a diminished collective soul; polluted waters mean a sickened soul. Water is the basis of our self-identity, and when we dream of canoes and thunderstorms and streams and even snowballs, we're dreaming about our innermost selves.

The problem is people establish a national park and think they've won the war. No way. That's only the first step—a battle in a longer war.