Quotes About Biodiversity

Poisonous frogs feast on insects that don't even have names. Tropical lizards disappear into the cracks of trees whose branches spread out as wide as their trunks climb high. This is the real Florida, as it was before people, and probably will be after us, too.

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity. We can classify our crops into those which are climate resilient and those which are climate sensitive. For example, wheat is a climate sensitive crop, while rice shows a wide range of adaptation in terms of growing conditions.

One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.

The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted. The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning, it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe.

Once a landscape is industrialized, its wild character is lost for good. You can't recreate untouched tundra, mountain meadows, crystal clear streams, and animals that have never encountered toxic waste.

When California was wild, it was the floweriest part of the continent.

In my cosmology, indigenous wild deer are more important than exotic ornamental shrubs.

If I'm honest, the thing I am proudest of is my varieties of wild flowers in the hay meadow.

The purpose of farming is to deprive other species of the land and sequester it for our own use. But by perfecting the art of monoculture, it has become too easy for us to exterminate everything else, leaving no wild plants, no food for insects, and a barren land for birds.

I mean, it is an extraordinary thing that a large proportion of your country and my country, of the citizens, never see a wild creature from dawn 'til dusk, unless it's a pigeon, which isn't really wild, which might come and settle near them.

You can't just go and collect animals from the wild. It's totally illegal.

Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived. It doesn't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, and not even the smartest. Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment. That is the sole test of survival and success.

One gram of moss from the forest floor, a piece about the size of a muffin, would harbour 150,000 protozoa, 132,000 tardigrades, 3,000 springtails, 800 rotifers, 500 nematodes, 400 mites, and 200 fly larvae. These numbers tell us something about the astounding quantity of life in a handful of moss.

Midway between land and water, freshwater marshes are among the most highly productive ecosystems on earth, rivaling the tropical rainforest.

Adaptive radiation, whether in Darwin's finches or in Dicranum, creates new species that are well adapted for specific ecological niches.

The same specialization has taken place in Dicranum. By sidestepping competition, numerous species can coexist, each in a habitat that they don't have to share with a sibling species, the mosses' equivalent of "A Room of One's Own.

Are all the pieces of the ecosystem still here and doing their duty?

I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents

Mosses are the amphibians of the plant world. They

Mosses are successful by any biological measure—they inhabit nearly every ecosystem on earth and number as many as 22,000 species. Like my niece finding small places to hide, mosses can live in a great diversity of small microcommunities where being large would be a disadvantage.

Restoring a habitat, no matter how good intentioned, produces casualties. We set ourselves us as arborators of what is good, when often our standards of goodness are driven by narrow interests. By what we want.

Soon after man shows up in new lands, the big game starts to go missing. […] A bad smell of extinction follows Home sapiens around the world. (37)

Our health relies entirely on the vitality of our fellow species on Earth.

In this quiet corner, the best wild flowers grow, and the first peepers are heard in the spring, even before the snow melts. Here, owls call from the treetops in the early morning, and the irreverent crows hold their noisy conventions. Here, the mother deer has her fawn, and the migrating geese come to rest. It is here that the fox is safe from the hunters.