Quotes About Biodiversity

The World Wildlife Fund estimated in 1994 that the number of sharks killed each year was between 40 million and 70 million. As

There was so much unrecognized novelty in the collection that at one point18 upon opening a new drawer Conway Morris famously was heard to mutter, 'Oh fuck, not another phylum.' The

report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In

the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them. No-one

It is a truly astounding fact that for the longest time the people who were most intensely interested in the world's living things were the ones most likely to extinguish them.

Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia's Exotic Invaders

There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals—220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears.

The rain forests of the Congo Basin contained so much water that they caused their own weather system, and were known as the "Lungs of Africa.

species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.)

You are 50 percent less likely to see a bumblebee than you were in 1974. Butterfly populations have decreased, according to one estimate, by 33 percent in the last twenty years. Three billion birds have disappeared from North American skies in the past five decades. Audubon's Birds and Climate Change Report warns that half of all birds on our continent are at risk

A study published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that if you look at the world's mammals by weight, 96 percent of that biomass is humans and livestock; just 4 percent is wild animals.

We humans will be diminished if we cannot even protect the animals closest to us, who share almost all of our genes, and who differ from us only by degree.

Conservationists who want to cosset nature like a delicate flower, to protect it from the threat of alien species, are the ethnic cleansers of nature, neutralizing the forces that they should be promoting.

By elevating the conservation status of supposedly pristine parts of nature, and disregarding the rest – the new wild – conservationists end up complicit in forest destruction and biodiversity loss. *

What can it mean, 150 years after Darwin, to say that some species or communities are good and some are bad?

Wildness is the preservation of the World.

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.

The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.

Well, I think breathing life into the Endangered Species Act, taking those wolves back into Yellowstone, restoring the salmon in the rivers of the Pacific Northwest.

As a child and young adult, I delighted in being able to identify almost any wild plant or animal.

You can cut a tree down, and it grows back. Once a species goes, it's gone forever.

We urgently need more trees, but we appear to believe that the only means of restoring them is planting. We have a national obsession with tree planting, which is in danger of becoming as tokenistic as bamboo toothbrushes and cotton tote bags.