Quotes About Biodiversity

I want to find more ways of planting trees and helping fight against deforestation.

Again and again we are confronted with the reality - some might say the problem - of sharing our space with other living things, be they dogs, trees, fish or penguins.

I have about 1,700 species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate.

The Endangered Species Act was designed to preserve biodiversity, not enrich trial lawyers and political activists.

I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each.

One begins to see bacteria, not as individual species, but as a vast array of interacting constituents of an integrated microbial world.

The contrast between these stories is painful but inescapable. It is not only the rainforest that is being chewed up in the industrial machine, but also human cultures 30,000 years old, ways of thinking radically different from Western approaches, plants that may never be seen again, and things that many of us will never know we lost.

Or as Lynn Margulis (and Dorion Sagan) once put it, "Our intolerant slogans continually denigrate the nonhuman life with which we share this planet.

Everything in that frame is judged in terms of the human, as if we are outside the ecological matrix in which we are embedded, as if evolution ended once and for all with our emergence, with the development of our brains.

Field biologists studying large and charismatic animals wanted to know if their own species had genetic problems. I listened carefully to stories of koalas in Australia, giant pandas in China, black-footed ferrets in the Midwest, elephants, rhinos, and leopards in Africa, and orangutans in Asia--all threatened or endangered species attended by packs of worried field biologists. If cheetahs paid a price for their brush with extinction, did these species suffer the same?

Giant northern elephant seals] were presumed extinct as late as 1912 when a group of eight seals was spotted on Guadalupe Island in the South Pacific by a Smithsonian expedition, which shot seven of them! Fortunately they missed one and failed to spot a few others.

The message is simple: love and conserve our wildlife.

The truth is that we will never save wildlife by killing it.

Now more than ever we are all becoming more aware about the need to conserve our precious living heritage.

medieval attitudes such as "the only good croc is a dead one," "the only good shark is a dead shark," "there's a snake—quick, kill it.

Australia has one of the worst mammalian extinction rates in the world.

Seasonally ploughing and harvesting crops will mash up a few moles, slice through a burrow of field mice and crush any ground-nesting bird chicks. Far more significant, however, is the creation of the field in the first place: an act that replaces entire ecosystems, along with all their animal inhabitants.

They're one of - crocs and snakes are two of my favorite animals. They're so good.

If there remain places on the planet that are un-known, unspoilt corners, a laboratory for evolution still exists - a snapshot of what the rainforests, polar deserts and high mountains were once like, before man.

Thousands of plant and animal varieties have fallen out of commerce in the last century as industrial agriculture has focused its attentions on a small handful of high yielding and usually patented varieties, with qualities that suited them to things like mechanical harvesting and processing.

More birds on a farm mean fewer insects, but most birds won't venture more than a couple hundred yards from the safety of cover. Like many species, their preferred habitat is the edge between forest and field. The biodiversity of the forest edge also helps control predators. As long as the weasels and coyotes have plenty of chipmunks and voles to eat, they're less likely to venture out and prey on the chickens.

By producing sugars and proteins to entice animals to disperse their seed, the angiosperms multiplied the world's supply of food energy, making possible the rise of large warm-blooded mammals. Without flowers, the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers, we would not be.

century ago, the typical Iowa farm raised more than a dozen different plant and animal species: cattle, chickens, corn, hogs, apples, hay, oats, potatoes, cherries, wheat, plums, grapes, and pears. Now it raises only two: corn and soybeans.

Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take care of the environment, and so they communicate that to us in a way we can understand." Why us? "We humans are the most populous bipedal organisms walking around, so some plants and fungi are especially interested in enlisting our support. I think they have a consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.