Quotes About Biodiversity

The question of one versus two species of African elephants isn't about settling an arcane DNA argument; it's about life or death for these majestic, extraordinary creatures.

Solberg; nature's greatest argument against cloning.

Adirondack Park, a 6-million-acre wilderness area and parkland in the Adirondack Mountains, is larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Glacier, and Olympic national parks combined.

The smaller, delicate Blue-headed Parrots were Tiko's stature; indeed they are closely related to him. Instead of Tiko's red, their foreheads were a delicate deep blue, but otherwise they were a rich and varied green—the basic parrot palette.

Mixing native flora with a foreign plant oftentimes has tragic consequences,

I am not a lover of lawns. Rather would I see daisies in their thousands, ground ivy, hawkweed, and even the hated plantain with tall stems, and dandelions with splendid flowers and fairy down, than the too-well-tended lawn.

Most of the reefs [around Christmas Island] are dead, most of the corals are dead, overgrown by algae, and most of the fish are smaller than the pencils we use to count them.

For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun.

Naturalist John Muir concluded sadly, "It is a great comfort … that vast multitudes of creatures, great and small and infinite in number, lived and had a good time in God's love before man was created.

Each species with which we share the earth is a success story. Each of our cohabitants has evolved an ingenious set of life strategies, and made them work. To live on an earth without fascinating, often beautiful creatures would be to live on a lesser earth. The trick is not to let them slip away, but to understand and help them on their terms.

With these surface waters, through a series of delicately adjusted, interlocking relationship, the life of all parts of the sea is linked. What happens to a diatom in the upper, sunlit strata of the sea may well determine what happens to a cod lying on a ledge of some rocky canyon a hundred fathoms below, or to a bed of multicolored, gorgeously plumed seaworms carpeting an underlying shoal. or to a prawn creeping over the soft oozes of the sea floor in the balckness of mile-deep water.

It was a house-that-Jack-built sequence, in which the large carnivores had eaten the smaller carnivores, that had eaten the herbivores, that had eaten the plankton, that had absorbed the poison from the water.

To the bird watcher, the suburbanite who derives joy from birds in his garden, the hunter, the fisherman or the explorer of wild regions, anything that destroys the wildlife of an area for even a single year has deprived him of pleasure to which he has a legitimate right.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

Shark Conservation

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

Ten thousand years ago, humans plus their pets and livestock accounted for about 0.1% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass inhabiting the earth; we now account for 98%.

I want viewers to see that everything is connected, even the little guys like pollinators and flowers.

If I go out in the open ocean environment, virtually anywhere in the world, and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface, most of the animals - in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent of the animals that I bring up in that net - make light. This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows.

any illness that kills one animal threatens to wipe out all (91): This curse of closely knit species also applies to our dairy cows, now almost clones of one another; an illness that kills one can kill all.

Heinz Heck wrote after the war that he and his brother had begun the back-breeding project out of curiosity, but also from the thought that if man cannot be halted in his mad destruction of himself and other creatures, it is at least a consolation if some of those kinds of animals he has already exterminated can be brought back to life again.

Over 2,000 reptiles await you.

Extinction wipes out, point by point, the clues to the code of existence; extirpation is the great, sucking retreat of the tide of life.

Of course, the plea for respect for nonhuman life goes far beyond the scientific delight of familiarity with our planet mates. The nonhuman forms of life with which we 6 000 million talking, upright apes share this finite planet are directly or indirectly connected to our well-being.