Quotes About Biodiversity

Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species.

I came to all the realizations about sustainability and biodiversity because I fell in love with the way food tastes. That was it. And because I was looking for that taste I feel at the doorsteps of the organic, local, sustainable farmers, dairy people and fisherman.

native: a plant or animal that has evolved in a given place over a period of time sufficient to develop complex and essential relationships with the physical environment and other organisms in a given ecological community.

Ecosystems function locally, not globally. Local extinction, the disappearance of a species within, say, the woodlot down the street, or even your front yard, is now predicted to compromise the productivity of that woodlot and your yard.

A century after its introduction, Eucalyptus stelloleta, a tree planted worldwide for lumber and ornamental purposes, supports only one species in California but 48 species of insects in its Australian homeland according to D. Strong and colleagues.

On average, native plants support thirteen times more caterpillar species than non-native plants.

Likewise, a home garden can be designed to serve a variety of environmental functions: • recharge groundwater • replenish atmospheric oxygen • sequester carbon • furnish shelter/cover for wildlife • promote a stable food web for wildlife • support pollinator communities • provide the right conditions for natural hybridization and the continuing development of biodiversity

You are not what you think you are. Instead of the form staring back at you when you look in the mirror, what you should imagine is your body as a collection of multiple dynamic ecosystems made up of very tiny, and very biologically diverse, organisms.

There is simply no issue more important. Conservation is the preservation of human life on earth, and that, above all else, is worth fighting for.

Specialists are the animals that remind us what an incredible fluke it is that our world exists at all; that the temperature is what it is, that the air we breathe is 21 percent oxygen. They remind us how much damage even the smallest changes to that system can cause and they show us how badly we're screwing things up.

protect biodiversity. It has used its political muscle in Washington to fight moves in other nations to ban

I will be very sad when global warming and toxins kill off all the toads and frogs and salamanders. Here's hoping we, as humans, figure out a way to be less stupid.

It is folly to think that we can destroy one species and ecosystem after another and not affect humanity. When we save species, we're actually saving ourselves.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

How little we really know about the life all around us. Would we be so cavalier and ruthless with it if we understood it better?

We endanger species.

We can talk all we want about conservation biology and about the use of science to measure biodiversity,45 but in the real, physical world the real, physical effects of science on real, living nonhumans has been nothing short of atrocious.

When you realize the value of all life you dwell less on past and concentrate more on the conservation of the future.

La destrucción voluntaria de una jirafa africana o de un kagú de Nueva Caledonia, en la medida en que compromete la supervivencia misma de tales especies, es el plano filosófico y científico, quizás tan grave como el asesinato de un hombre y tan irreparabale como la laceración de un cuadro de Rafael. Acaba para siempre con un fragmento del pasado. Roger Hein.

Across the continent since Europeans first arrived, 92 per cent of old-growth forest has been destroyed. The

Today only a handful of apes survive— the orangutan and gibbon in Asia, and the chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla in Africa— and most of them are hanging in the balance, thanks to human pressures. During the Miocene, however, as many as one hundred ape species flourished throughout the Old World. One of these gave rise to the human lineage.

There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.

The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we'll start thinking of doing something about it.

Great attention gets paid to rainforests because of the diversity of life there. Diversity in the oceans is even greater.