Biodiversity Quotes - Page 2

• What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit

  Chief Seattle

  Loneliness, Men, Gone

  Seattle (Chief) (1976). “Chief Seattle's Testimony”

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• The world is more than the sum of its suffering.

  Deepak Chopra

  Spiritual, Mathematical Logic, Greek

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• The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

  Aristotle

  Peace, Philosophical, Logical Reasoning

  James McLean Watson, Aristotle (1909). “Aristotle's criticisms of Plato”

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• Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work.

  Thomas Lovejoy

  Library, Natural, Complexity

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• The more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be.

  Fritjof Capra

  Ecosystems, Resilience, Networking

  Fritjof Capra (1996). “The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems”, Doubleday

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• Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man?

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Nature, Men, World

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• The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century.

  Philip Shabecoff

  Nature, Environmental, Bombs

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• We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

  Albert Einstein

  Nature, Thinking, Web Of Life

  Albert Einstein (2015). “Bite-Size Einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything from the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century”, p.15, St. Martin's Press

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• When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all the works of some great writer have perished.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Animal, Feels Just, Conservation

  Theodore Roosevelt (2010). “The Green Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt in Appreciation of Wilderness, Wildlife, and Wild Places”, p.24, Cambria Press

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• A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

  Aldo Leopold

  Beauty, Nature, Integrity

  A Sand County Almanac pt. 3 (1949)

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• It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars.

  David Attenborough

  Stars, Two, Care

  "Is it worth saving the world’s most worthless species?". www.iucn.org. November 26, 2012.

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• 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.

  Dan Lipinski

  Loss, Energy, Climate

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• Protecting biodiversity is just as important and critical to the survival of mankind as stabilizing the climate. Species protection and climate are interdependent.

  Klaus Topfer

  Survival, Important, Climate

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.

  Diane Ackerman

  Animal, Different, Needs

  Diane Ackerman (2014). “The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us”, p.92, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It's not just global warming, it's not just a loss of biodiversity, it's not just the pollution of our oceans and the clearing of our rainforests and all these complicated systems, The [11th Hour] movie talks about the world economy, it talks about politics, it talks about personal transformation and environmental consciousness that we need to have in this generation to implement a lot of these changes that need to occur.

  Leonardo DiCaprio

  Ocean, Loss, Personal Transformation

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• The essential role of the environment is still marginal in discussions about poverty. While we continue to debate these initiatives, environmental degradation, including the loss of biodiversity and topsoil, accelerates, causing development efforts to falter.

  Wangari Maathai

  Loss, Effort, Environmental

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• No piecemeal solution is going to prevent the collapse of whole societies and ecosystems ... a radical re-thinking of our values, priorities and political systems is urgent.

  Maude Barlow

  Thinking, Ecosystems, Priorities

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• What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger.

  William Gibson

  Rain, Forests, Culture

  Source: craphound.com

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• Little by little people are understanding that we need to change, but whatever we decide to do in next 10 to 15 years will decide the future of biodiversity on Earth.

  Anthony D. Barnosky

  Change, Years, People

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• Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone.

  Donella Meadows

  Zoos, Needs, National Parks

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• We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth's functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and geocide, the devastation of the earth itself.

  Thomas Berry

  Suicide, Environmental, Earth

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.104, Crown

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• Although biodiversity loss continues globally, many countries are significantly slowing the rate of loss by shoring up protected natural areas and the services they provide, and in expanding national park systems with tighter management and more secure funding.

  Helen Clark

  Country, Loss, Parks

  "Helen Clark: UNDP's Pragmatic Visionary". Interview with Michael Tobias, www.forbes.com. March 29, 2012.

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• Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Flower, Men, Two

  Claude Levi-Strauss (2012). “Tristes Tropiques”, p.44, Penguin

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• There are more effective ways of tackling environmental problems – including global warming, proliferation of plastics, urban sprawl, and the loss of biodiversity – than by treaties, top-down regulations, and other approaches offered by big governments and their dependents.

  Preston Manning

  Loss, Top Down, Government

  "Preston Manning on the state of the conservative movement" by Aaron Wherry, www.macleans.ca. March 9, 2013.

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• Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

  Wallace Stegner

  Zoos, Dirty, Book

  Wallace Earle Stegner (2007). “The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner”, Counterpoint

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