Quotes About Extinction

In other words, we saved an animal from extinction just so we could start killing it again. How messed up is that?

Shrinking forests, melting ice, plowed grasslands, raging fires, drying rivers, and dying corals — diminished of all the major habitats, proxy for all who live therein, means that the numbers of free-living animals are the lowest ever, and mostly falling, across the board. It means something acutely awful, I think: that the human species has made itself incompatible with the rest of Life on Earth.

This litany of loss […] is the profile of a species going extinct. In a generation or two the memory of wild Africa will be lost as utterly as an American prairie of head high wild flowers swirled by bison, darkened by wild pigeons, bordered by towering forests of chestnuts, as it all was mere moments ago.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

We are rendering many species extinct; we may even succeed in destroying ourselves. But this is nothing new for the Earth. Humans would then be just the latest in a long sequence of upstart species that arrive on-stage, make some alterations in the scenery, kill off some of the cast, and then themselves exit stage-left forever. New players appear in the next act. The Earth abides. It has seen all this before.

almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception.

All the explanations proposed seem to be only partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic change to mammalian predation to the extinction of a plant with apparent laxative properties, in which case the dinosaurs died of constipation.

Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

at least some paleontologists believe that the demise of the dinosaurs was accelerated by nocturnal predation on reptilian eggs by the early mammals. Two chicken eggs for breakfast may be all-at least on the surface-that is left of this ancient mammalian cuisine.

Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence.

One consequence of this train of argument is that, even if civilizations commonly arise on planets throughout the Galaxy, few of them will be both long-lived and nontechnological. Since hazards from asteroids and comets must apply to inhabited planets all over the Galaxy, if there are such, intelligent beings everywhere will have to unify their home worlds politically, leave their planets, and move small nearby worlds around. Their eventual choice, as ours, is spaceflight or extinction.

Como es lógico, existe un ritmo constante y básico de extinciones. En nuestra época, las especies se extinguen cada año a consecuencia de las actividades humanas: la urbanización, la caza, la contaminación industrial o la destrucción de los bosques tropicales.

La extinción es la regla. La supervivencia es la excepción.

We will amuse and entertain ourselves into extinction.

to realize it leads directly to extinction. Sooner or later nature will have no more to give them.

Humans have blinded themselves to the reality of what they are doing. When you closely examine the path they have taken, you come to realize it leads directly to extinction.

All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that. [ . . . ] Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.

The 1973 Endangered Species Act has been more than 99 percent successful at preventing the extinction of species under its watch. Scientists credit the ESA for saving 227 species from going extinct.

Humility is born in wildness. We are not protecting grizzlies from extinction; they are protecting us from the extinction of experience as we engage with a world beyond ourselves. The very presence of a grizzly returns us to an ecology of awe. We tremble at what appears to be a dream yet stands before us on two legs and roars.

Find joy in the extinction of desires.

Te bastará con familiarizarte con la naturaleza y ella se acercará a ti. El hombre, si es inteligente, por supuesto, es capaz de crearlo todo, desde las calumnias hasta los bebés probeta, pero al mismo tiempo extermina a diario dos o tres especies en el mundo. Este es el gran autoengaño de los hombres.

As a Sufi Muslim you cultivated within yourself the thought of oneness, or monism, and made progress in experiencing each seemingly separate thing as an illusory veil over the eternal truth. You recognized the reality of God and the unimportance of matter, and one of the verses of the Koran that was the most dear to you was, "All things in creation suffer extinction and there remaineth the face of thy Lord in its majesty and bounty.

A very much larger number have existed over the past history of life, owing to the fact that the ultimate fate of nearly all species is extinction, as described in Chapter 4.)