Quotes About Biodiversity

I've moved away from that sort of deep-ecological extremism. I started to think: what can we do for wild birds right now? I don't want these particular species to disappear.

Skoro nawet ka?dy z tych najmniejszych i najmniej znaczÄ…cych gatunków [fauny i flory] w przyrodzie unicestwiÅ' tysiÄ…ce innych - dlaczegó? my, panowie stworzenia, nie mielibyÅ›my tego czyni??

Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years.

Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; rats of every description—all of them poured from the hulls of Colón's vessels and those that followed, rushing like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before.

Maize is one of the few farm species that is more diverse than most wild plants.

These old forests, called fallows, have traditionally been classified as high forest (pristine forest on well-drained ground) by Western researchers," Balée wrote in 2003. But they "would not exist" without "human agricultural activities.

the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all the other organic beings ...

In the latter country alone, very many (probably several hundred) square miles are covered by one mass of these prickly plants, and are impenetrable by man or beast. Over the undulating plains, where these great beds occur, nothing else can now live. Before their introduction, however, the surface must have supported, as in other parts, a rank herbage. I doubt whether any case is on record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant over the aborigines.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

If the country were open on its borders, new forms would certainly immigrate, and this also would seriously disturb the relations of some of the former inhabitants.

Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!

The number of living creatures of all orders whose existence intimately depends on kelp is wonderful. A great volume might be written describing the inhabitants of one of these beds of seaweed…. I can only compare these great aquatic forests…with terrestrial ones in the intertropical regions. Yet, if in any other country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe so many species of animals would perish as would here, from the destruction of kelp

to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian forest.

Our march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet.25 At this rate, by 2030, only ten percent of the Earth's tropical forests will remain.

Animals interest me more than anything else.

Aotearoa is one of the most beautiful places in the world and we have to protect that.

each Swift consumes some six thousand insects per day.

The economic value of ecotourism related to coral reefs alone totals some $9 billion.

The average yard is both an ecological and agricultural desert. The prime offender is short-mown grass, which offers no habitat and nothing for people except a place to sit, yet sucks down far more water and chemicals than a comparable amount of farmland.

The average yard is both an ecological and agricultural desert.

It is only our limited time frame that creates the whole natives versus exotics controversy. Wind animals, sea currents, and continental drift have always dispersed species into new environments... The planet has been awash in surging , swarming species movement since life began. The fact that it is not one great homogeneous tangled weed lot is persuasive testimony to the fact that intact ecosystems are very difficult to invade.

Nature is thus more than a diverse gene bank harboring undiscovered herbal cures for future diseases—although

Eliminate one species, and another increases in number to take its place

Environment' is a term that creates no pictures in the mind, which is why I have begun to use 'natural world' or 'living planet' instead.