Quotes About Biodiversity

God's active delight in creation only heightens human agency in behalf of creation, for it all comes down to this: to feed the flame of biophilia, both God's and ours, we must preserve and sustain creation's biodiversity. If Leviathan falls, then so do we all.

A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.

Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications." There's a nice word: ramifications. It's especially good in this context because, while the literal definition is "a structure formed of branches," from the Latin ramus, of course the looser definition is "implications." Darwin's tree certainly had implications.

Vast areas of old forest have been cut, or chained down with bulldozers, to make way for cattle ranching and urban sprawl. People have planted orchards, established urban parks, landscaped their yards with blossoming trees, and created other unintended enticements amid the cities and suburbs. 'So bats have decided that, as their native habitat is disappearing, as climate is becoming more variable, and their food source is becoming less diverse, it's easier to live in an urban area.

Humanity badly needs things that are big and fearsome and homicidally wild. Counterintuitive as it may seem, we need to preserve those few remaining beasts, places, and forces of nature capable of murdering us with sublime indifference.

At the Chatou market in Guangzhou, for instance, he had seen storks, seagulls, herons, cranes, deer, alligators, crocodiles, wild pigs, raccoon dogs, flying squirrels, many snakes and turtles, many frogs, as well as domestic dogs and cats, all on sale as food.

You could also buy leopard cat, Chinese muntjac, Siberian weasel, Eurasian badger, Chinese bamboo rat, butterfly lizard, and Chinese toad, plus a long list of other reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, including two kinds of fruit bat. Quite an epicure's menu. And of course birds: cattle egrets, spoonbills, cormorants, magpies, a vast selection of ducks and geese and pheasants and doves, plovers, crakes, rails, moorhens, coots, sandpipers, jays, several flavors of crow.

Invadimos los bosques tropicales y otros espacios salvajes, que albergan una enorme cantidad de especies de animales y plantas; y en el seno de estas criaturas, multitud de virus desconocidos. Talamos árboles; matamos animales o los enjaulamos para enviarlos a los mercados. Alteramos ecosistemas y provocamos que los virus escapen de sus huéspedes naturales. Cuando esto ocurre, los virus necesitan un nuevo huésped. A menudo, ese huésped somos nosotros.

To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat.

From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

The song of the dodo, if it had one, is forever unknowable because no human from whom we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the Mauritian forest and listen.

Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare.

Two: Those millions of unknown creatures include viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists, and other organisms, many of which are parasitic.

Trophic cascades, as defined by Diamond in his "Rosetta Stone" paper, are the secondary effects that can ramify from level to level in consequence of a single extinction.

We know that ecological isolation—either by seawater or by other sorts of delimitation—correlates strongly with risk of extinction

Let's keep an eye on wild creatures. As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we're getting their diseases.

It is absolutely imperative that we protect, preserve and pass on this genetic heritage for man and every other living thing in as good a condition as we received it.

Every time we exterminate a predator, we are in a sense creating a new predator.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises — car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change.

Virtually all of the extremely important services that nature provides are completely ignored by conventional economics. The ozone layer, for example, shields all life from DNA-damaging ultraviolet radiation.

Life thrives on life;

On Earth, among millions of lineages or organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence ; this makes me believe its utter improbablity.

When the wolves are gone there will be too many caribou grazing the grass and the lemmings will starve. Without the lemmings the foxes and birds and weasels will die. Their passing will end smaller lives upon which even man depends, whether he knows it or not, and the top of the world will pass into silence.