Quotes About Biodiversity

There is no solution available, I assure you, to save Earth's biodiversity other than the preservation of natural environments in reserves large enough to maintain wild populations sustainably. Only Nature can serve as the planetary ark.

if we save the living world, we will also automatically save the physical world, because in order to achieve the first we must also achieve the second. But if we save only the physical world, which appears our present inclination, we will ultimately lose them both.

Somos la única especie que ha comprendido la realidad del mundo viviente, que ha visto la belleza de la naturaleza y que le ha dado valor al individuo. Sólo nosotros hemos valorado la cualidad de la misericordia entre los de nuestra clase. Ahora, ¿podríamos preocuparnos también por el mundo viviente que nos dio a luz?

Annie Dillard was a pioneer in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Among other notable examples are David M. Carroll's Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook (2009); David George Haskell's The Forest Unseen (2012); and Dave Goulson's A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm (2015).

The original level of biodiversity is not likely to be regained in any period of time that has meaning for the human mind.

ALMOST ALL MY LIFE I HAVE DREAMED OF THE TROPICS. MY fantasies drifted far beyond the benign temperate zone of Thoreau and Muir.

While our species continues to manufacture its radically different and untested all-human world, the rest of life should be allowed to endure, for our own safety. While preserving our own deep history, it will, if we choose to let it, continue on its own trajectory through evolutionary time. By thus maintaining two parallel worlds on the planet, humanity will ensure the survival and continued advanced of the rest of life, and of ourselves.

One planet, one experiment.

The great challenge of the twenty-first century is to raise people everywhere to a decent standard of living while preserving as much of the rest of life as possible.

I have this idea of trying to catalog all the genes on the planet.

I'd like to see the Amazon rainforests before they're all gone, and also the Galapagos - that's another one I'd like to do. I'd love to go diving in those areas. Basically, places, like, that are kind of going away, and I'd like to see them before they all become condos and high-rises.

The color and shape of flowers are a precise record of what bees find attractive

We must teach our children, our students, and our political and corporate leaders the fundamental facts of life—for example, that one species' waste is another species' food; that matter cycles continually through the web of life; that the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun; that diversity assures resilience; that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.

The most complex ecosystems on Earth are the tropical coral reef and the tropical rainforest. Both are characterized by large numbers of species, a rapid turnover of matter and energy, and extensive recycling of all essential materials. In both of these ecosystems, the principles of ecology are exhibited clearly and beautifully.

Farmers used to plant different crops every year, rotating them so that the balance in the soil was preserved. No pesticides were needed, since insects attracted to one crop would disappear with the next. Instead of using chemical fertilizers, farmers would enrich their fields with manure, thus returning organic matter to the soil to reenter the ecological cycle.

If America wishes to preserve her native birds, we must help supply what civilization has taken from them. The building of cities and towns, the cutting down of forests, and the draining of pools and swamps have deprived American birds of their original homes and food supply.

I have lived long enough to witness the vanishing of wild mammals, butterflies, mayflies, songbirds and fish that I once feared my grandchildren would not experience: it has all happened faster than even the pessimists predicted.

People will be able to survive, of course, without honeycreepers and monk seals. But if the wolf spider is in trouble, we are in trouble, too.

In October 2014, for the first time in almost three-quarters of a century, a gray wolf was seen loping along the forested North Rim of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. She had walked hundreds of miles, probably from Wyoming or Idaho.

Apex predators are good for an environment in terms of biodiversity and trophic cascade - we have very few. But realistically, only a few areas could sustain free-roaming wolves in Britain, mostly in Scotland.

The protection of biodiversity and, therefore, of endangered species is an issue to which I attach a great deal of importance.

An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare. So you don't lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. Therefore, they're not perceived as a big loss.

I think that most people would associate big schools of fish with healthy coral reefs. At Kingman, the predators keep the herd thin, so there aren't a lot of big fish schools.

Is there anything in the jungle too little to be killed?