Quotes About Biodiversity

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

Cockroaches appeared 120 million years before the dinosaurs.

Woodpeckers are natural engineers whose abandoned nest and roost cavities facilitate a great diversity of life, including birds, mammals, invertebrates, and many fungi,moss, and lichens. Without woodpeckers, birds such as chickadees and tits, swallows ans martins, bluebirds, some flycatchers, nuthatches, wood ducks, hooded mergansers, and small owls (screech, saw-whet, and pygmy) would be homeless.

Those of us who retain dead trees or place nest boxes in our yards enjoy the wonder of watching woodpeckers listen and dig for termites; we are serenaded by wrens; and we benefit from the appetites of swallow, chickadee, bluebird, and flycatcher broods that are sated on insects, including pesky mosquitoes.

To remember what bio-diversity is and why it is important, we must conserve nature close to where we live and work as well as develop distant reserves.

I believe our biggest issue is the same biggest issue that the whole world is facing, and that's habitat destruction.

Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.

We have environmental laws for a reason: to protect endangered biodiversity. And as a country that has one of the highest loss of species anywhere in the world, they're important.

Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning the library without ever having read its books.

One in eight plant species face extinction.

Our planet has not seen an extinction crisis as serious as the one in progress for 65 million years.

We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.

We need bees to survive.

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself.

Nevertheless, again and again, in season and out of season, the question comes up, What are rattlesnakes good for? As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God's ways....Anyhow, they are all, head and tail, good for themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life. -from the essay Yellowstone Park

Nevertheless, again and again, in season and our of season, the question comes up, What are rattlesnakes good for? As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were Gods' ways.... Anyhow, they are all, head and tail, good for themselves, and we need not begrudge them their share of life.

Today, I'm a conservationist because I believe that my species doesn't have the right or option to determine the fate of other species, even ones that inspire fear in us.

When you control seed, you control food.

The system of seeds based on monoculture is wrong and inappropriate. The biodiverse system has produced more food, and biodiversity means that seeds must be in the hands of farmers.

To survive, humans need food, water, and air. Yet biodiversity, the Earth's bodies of water, and the planet's atmosphere are all under threat.

In every remote corner there are people like Carl Jones and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving them. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an endangered species and extinction.

Orcas continually prove there are more things in the ocean than are dreamt of in our science.

Scientists warn that if orcas can't survive, we won't either.

One planet, one experiment.