Quotes About Extirpation

Why, then, did it disappear 45,000 years ago? Of course, if diprotodons had been the only large animal to disappear at this time, it might have been just a fluke. But more than 90 percent of Australia's megafauna disappeared along with the diprotodon

It's unavoidable: so long as we value money more highly than living beings and more highly than relationships, we will continue to see living beings as resources, and convert them to cash; objectifying, killing, extirpating. This is true whether we're talking about fish, fur-bearing mammals, Indians, day-laborers, and so on. If monetary value is attached to something it will be exploited until it's gone.

Total species elimination

When the prey of the sabre-toothed cat died out, so did the cat.

Four years of occupation, and the roar of oncoming bombers is the roar of what? Deliverance? Extirpation? The clack-clack of small-arms fire. The gravelly snare drums of flak. A dozen pigeons roosting on the cathedral spire cataract down its length and wheel out over the sea.

The turpitude, the inhumanity, the cruelty, and the infamy of the African commerce in slaves have been so impressively represented to the public by the highest powers of eloquence that nothing that I can say would increase the just odium in which it is and ought to be held. Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States.

On land, every animal larger than a cat seems to have died out.

All they had to do was pick off a mammoth or a giant ground sloth every so often, when the opportunity arose, and keep this up for several centuries. This would have been enough to drive the populations of slow-reproducing species first into decline and then, eventually, all the way down to zero.

The past is a distraction, a source of envy, enmity, bitterness. Only the present matters, for only in the present can we shape the future. Cut loose the past; it is dead weight. Let the Extirpation continue. Let it never end.

Did man, after his first inroad into South America, destroy, as has been suggested, the unwieldy Megatherium and the other Edentata?

By mid-April, Zúñiga's warnings were growing shrill. He told the king that the English planned to quickly establish a presence so large that by the time "they open their eyes in Spain" it will be too late to take action. "Your Majesty will appreciate how important this is to your royal interests, and so I hope [you] will quickly command the extirpation of these insolents.

The Nazis organized the extirpation of between 700,000 and one million Jews and Poles between September 1939 and the summer of 19424—a casualty rate approaching that which the Turks had achieved in a comparable time using nearly identical methods.

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