Quotes About Ecology

The author David Quammen cautions that while it is easy to demonize the brown tree snake, the animal is not evil; it's just amoral and in the wrong place. What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, "is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

All they had to do was pick off a mammoth or a giant ground sloth every so often, when the opportunity arose, and keep this up for several centuries. This would have been enough to drive the populations of slow-reproducing species first into decline and then, eventually, all the way down to zero.

Then the frogs around El Valle started to disappear.

A hundred starlings let loose in Central Park have by now multiplied to more than two hundred million.

What Boiga irregularis has done in Guam, he observes, "is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species.

Wood storks cool off by defecating on their own legs. (In

Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons.

Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons

sea ice covers just half the area it did thirty years ago

generating enough heat to, in effect, broil the surface of the planet.

After the initial heat pulse, the world experienced a multiseason "impact winter.

One weedy species," the pair observed, "has unwittingly achieved the ability to directly affect its own fate and that of most of the other species on this planet.

His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species.

By transporting Asian species to North America, and North American species to Australia, and Australian species to Africa, and European species to Antarctica, we are, in effect, reassembling the world into one enormous supercontinent—what biologists sometimes refer to as the New Pangaea.

The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that "Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims." A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

In a similar vein, Jared Diamond has observed: "Personally, I can't fathom why Australia's giants should have survived innumerable droughts in their tens of millions of years of Australian history, and then have chosen to drop dead almost simultaneously (at least on a time scale of millions of years) precisely and just coincidentally when the first humans arrived.

It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion.

the zoologist Konrad Lorenz, whose studies of animal behavior (the best known is On Aggression) stressed Haeckel's notion that animal and habitat—including man and his environment—form a single unit

We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.

We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.