Quotes About Biodiversity

Every time you dive, you hope you'll see something new - some new species. Sometimes the ocean gives you a gift, sometimes it doesn't.

species went extinct.

Abundant life occurs where it is warm and wet on land and where it is quite cool, less then 12°C, in the ocean.

Overfishing of the past fifty years has driven the population of large fish down by ninety percent. And climate change is acidifying and warming the waters, lessening its ability to hold oxygen, suffocating marine life. We are rapidly killing the seas beyond the ability to heal.

There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.

The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.

Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.

The value of biodiversity is that it makes our ecosystems more resilient, which is a prerequisite for stable societies; its wanton destruction is akin to setting fire to our lifeboat.

Having grown up on Sarawak, a Malaysian state on Borneo, I had become increasingly incensed by the seemingly mad and wanton destruction of the world's third largest and most biodiverse rainforest, the Borneo Jungle.

Global climate change has become entangled with the problem of invasive species. A warmer climate could allow some invaders to spread farther, while causing native organisms to go extinct in their traditional habitats and making room for invaders.

We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference.

We see evidence that lakes and forests and wetlands can have different equilibria - so you have a savanna system that may be stable and thriving, but it can also tip over and become an arid steppe if pushed too far by warming, land degradation, and biodiversity loss.

A few dozen changes to the genome of a modern elephant - to give it subcutaneous fat, woolly hair and sebaceous glands - might suffice to create a variation that is functionally similar to the mammoth. Returning this keystone species to the tundras could stave off some effects of warming.

Species are going extinct because of habitat loss and warming. I feel deeply responsible and think about it every day.

When I was in the seventh grade I did a report about the environment and the loss of species. It was supposed to be only a few pages, but ended up being nearly 50.

Wildlife is and should be useless in the same way art, music, poetry and even sports are useless. They are useless in the sense that they do nothing more than raise our spirits, make us laugh or cry, frighten, disturb and delight us. They connect us not just to what's weird, different, other, but to a world where we humans do not matter nearly as much as we like to think. And that should be enough.

There exists no objective basis on which to elevate one species above another.

Species are grouped together into genera, genera into orders, and orders into classes. Lions and antelopes are both members of the class Mammalia, as are we. Should we then not expect lions to refrain from killing antelopes, 'for the good of the mammals'? Surely they should hunt birds or reptiles instead, in order to prevent the extinction of the class. But then, what of the need to perpetuate the whole phylum of vertebrates?

I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species and phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish

Our planet is currently undergoing a mass extinction of species called the Anthropocene - the Age of Man.

If the bees disappear, man would have only four years of life left.

Without birds, trees would be very lonely and men too!

The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.

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