Quotes About Biodiversity

Brazil has one of the greatest natural patrimonies in terms of biodiversity.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

Our presence is not inherently evil and undesirable; it just has to be at the right scale, speed, and design. We can be an expression of biodiversity as worthy as any other species with whom we have co-evolved; we have a place and a vibrant role to play in ecosystems. It is our wild excess of procreation, ill-considered consumption priorities, and unbridled frenzy of activity that drowns the possibilities and existence of individuals from other species. That is where we have gone wrong.

The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.

If we treat our forests right, we can at least ameliorate the declines in forest extent and diversity and the consequent impoverishment of the aesthetic, economic, climatic, and spiritual benefits we count on from them.

In planting trees, aim to perpetuate an ecosystem, not a plantation.

The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies.

No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.

Cryptozoologists estimate that fifteen to twenty percent of the animals in the world are unknown to us. There is so much in nature we haven't seen yet.

The key to helping our rarer species to thrive is probably simply to add more flower patches to the landscape, making it a little easier for them to find food and keep their nests well provisioned.

Since the grasses are being parasitised, they grow less, leaving more room for other flowering plants. Pywell demonstrated that sowing rattle seed into an English meadow significantly boosted the diversity of flowers present by suppressing growth of grasses.

We are committing ecocide on a biblical scale. I am in no way religious, but if you are, consider this; do you really think God created wonderful diversity and gave us dominion over it so we could exterminate it? Do you really think He or She is pleased with what we have done?

James caught and measured the size of hundreds of wild, foraging buff-tails in and around Southampton, and found that the average size and tongue length varied greatly depending on which flower he caught them on.

Most of the rare species seemed to be very fond of clover, particularly red clover, and other wild legumes such as tufted vetch and bird's-foot trefoil, probably because these plants provide pollen that is unusually rich in protein.

It is the threat of extinction of large mammals such as tigers or rhinoceros that tends to capture the public's attention, but arguably it is the loss of the smaller creatures that should give us most concern. Insects are responsible for delivering numerous 'ecosystem services' such as pollination and decomposition, and there is no doubt that little life on earth (including ourselves) could survive without them.

It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.

We only know a tiny proportion about the complexity of the natural world. Wherever you look, there are still things we don't know about and don't understand. [...] There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.

We ourselves (one single species) have taken over vast tracts of the inhabitable surface of the planet. Surely, we should allow those other creatures we share the planet with to retain some part of their ancient heritage.

To restore stability to our planet, therefore, we must restore its biodiversity, the very thing we have removed. It is the only way out of this crisis that we ourselves have created. We must rewild the world!

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

If we were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if they were to disappear, the land's ecosystems would collapse.

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

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.

For life to truly thrive on this planet, there must be immense biodiversity. Only when billions of different individual organisms make the most of every resource and opportunity they encounter, and millions of species lead lives that interlock so that they sustain each other, can the planet run efficiently. The greater the biodiversity, the more secure will be all life on Earth, including ourselves. Yet the way we humans are now living on Earth is sending biodiversity into a decline.