|
BIODIVERSITY
It is
that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole
thing - rather than just one or two stars.
-- David Attenborough
|
|
We
are committed with our lives to building a different
model and a different future for humanity, the Earth,
and other species. We have envisaged a moral alternative
to economic globalization and we will not rest until
we see it realized.
-- Maude
Barlow
*
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
|
|
"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
|
 |
"Each
one [of the Earth's 5 million invertebrate species] plays
a role in its ecosystem. It's like we're tearing the cogs
out of a great machine. The machine might work after you tear
out ten cogs, but what happens when you tear out a hundred?"
— Scott Black
|
|
*
Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse
to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man?
~ Kenneth
E. Boulding
*
With laissez-faire and price atomic,
Ecology's Uneconomic,
But with another kind of logic
Economy's Unecologic.
~ Kenneth
E. Boulding
|
The
number of people displaced by dams is estimated at between
40 million and 80 million, most of them in China and India.
The costs of dams were on average 50% above their original
estimate. Some designed to reduce flooding made it worse,
and there were many unexpected environmental disadvantages,
including the extinction of fish and bird species. Half the
world's wetlands had been lost because of dams.
-- Paul Brown
 |
A
diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it
contains many species with overlapping ecological functions
that can partially replace one another. When a particular
species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that
a link in the network is broken, a diverse community
will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In
other words, the more complex the network is, the more
complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient
it will be.
-- Fritjof
Capra
|
|
"There
is something fundamentally wrong with treating the earth
as if it were a business in liquidation."
~ Herman
Daly
|
 |
|
*
When
I was very young, biology, the diversity of life, was
one of my main interests. I know there's this image
people have that I'm this spoiled, cocky punk of an
actor. Honestly, that's not who I am. I really care
that so many species have been wiped out, like genocide
of entire races. I believe in the divine right of all
species to survive on this planet. So I decided I want
to be active as an environmentalist. I learned. I asked
experts. I got active.
~ Leonardo
DiCaprio
|
 |
The
nation’s biological diversity has great economic, aesthetic,
and spiritual value.”
-- Ecological Society of America
 |
Scientists
know we must protect species because they are working
parts of our life-support system.
-- Paul
Ehrlich
|
Biodiversity
is the greatest treasure we have... Its diminishment is to
be prevented at all cost.
- Thomas Eisner
"We
consider species to be like a brick in the foundation of
a building. You can probably lose one or two or a dozen
bricks and still have a standing house. But by the time
you've lost 20 per cent of species, you're going to destabilize
the entire structure. That's the way ecosystems work."
- Donald Falk
|
*
"When
we protect the places where the processes of life
can flourish, we strengthen not only the future of
medicine, agriculture and industry, but also the essential
conditions for peace and prosperity."
~ Harrison
Ford
*
"Our
health relies entirely on the vitality of our fellow
species on Earth."
~ Harrison
Ford
|
 |
 |
*
As
custodians of the planet it is our responsibility to
deal with all species with kindness, love and compassion.
That these animals suffer through human cruelty is beyond
understanding. Please help to stop this madness.
-- Richard
Gere |
"We
cannot win this battle to save species and environments
without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and
nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do
not love."
~ Stephen Jay Gould
|
"For if one link in nature's chain might be lost,
another might be lost, until the whole of things will
vanish by piecemeal."
~ Thomas
Jefferson
|
 |
"What
an extraordinary time to be alive. We’re the first people
on our planet to have real choice: we can continue killing
each other, wiping out other species, spoiling our nest.
Yet on every continent a revolution in human dignity
is emerging. It is re-knitting community and our ties
to the earth. So we do have a choice. We can choose
death; or we can choose life."
-- Frances
Moore Lappe |
 |
|
"In
the area of species protection, we should concern
ourselves with what is right as opposed to what might
be easier, or popular in the short term."
~ Richard
Leakey
"It's
the next annihilation of vast numbers of species.
It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its
cause"
~ Richard
Leakey
|
 |
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
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
"Natural
species are the library from which genetic engineers can
work."
- Thomas E. Lovejoy
"It
should not be believed that all beings exist for the sake
of the existence of man. On the contrary, all the other
beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not
for the sake of something else."
- Maimonides
The
medical argument for animal testing doesn't stand up.
Even if it did, I don't think we should kill other species.
We think we're so much better; I'm not sure we are.
I tell people, We've beaten into submission every animal
on the face of the Earth, so we are the clear winners
of whatever battle is going on between the species.
Couldn't we be generous? I really do think it's time
to get nice. No need to keep beating up on them. I think
we've got to show that we're kind.
-- Paul
McCartney |
|
|
|
What
little wilderness remains displays the patterns we
must return to, if our species and as many others
as now remain are to persist here a while. Ideally
this would call for a broad cultural rapprochment
with the wild, a long overdue armistice in civilization’s
war upon it.
~ Stephanie
Mills
|
We
share this planet with many species. It is our responsibility
to protect them, both for their sakes and our own.
- Pamela A. Matson
Every
time we lose a species webreak a life chain which has evolved
over 3.5 billion years.
-- Jeffrey McNeely
"We—human
beings—are part of 'biodiversity.' We are dependent on the
whole food chain down below us."
— Darrell Merrell
Biodiversity
is our nation's natural wealth. The Endangered Species Act
safeguards these riches.
- Judy L. Meyer
"We
are into the opening stages of a human-caused biotic holocaust--a
wholesale elimination of species--that could leave the planet
impoverished for at least five million years."
-- Norman Myers
"Without
knowing it, we utilize hundreds of products each day that
owe their origin to wild animals and plants. Indeed our
welfare is intimately tied up with the welfare of wildlife.
Well may conservationists proclaim that by saving the lives
of wild species, we may be saving our own."
- Norman Myers
"The
current massive degradation of habitat and extinction of
species is taking place on a catastrophically short timescale,
and their effects will fundamentally reset the future evolution
of the planet's biota."
-- National Academy of Sciences
|
|
*
We
develop our beautiful planet in such a way that we
brush aside the species… we risk creating a wasteland,
where our aspirations will ultimately wither and die"
-- Queen
Noor of Jordan
|
"The
value of biodiversity is more than the sum of its parts."
- Byran G. Norton
Star Trek
was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and
wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but
take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences
in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those
small differences, to take a positive delight in those small
differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then
we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity
that is almost certainly out there.
~ Gene Roddenberry
"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
|
|
"Biological
diversity is being lost at a rate unequalled since the appearance
of modern ecosystems more than 40 million years ago. A quarter
of all mammals are threatened with extinction and nearly 70%
of the world’s fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited
or depleted."
-- Royal Society
Each
species on our planet plays a role in the healthy functioning
of natural ecosystems, on which humans depend.
- William H. Schlesinger
|
|
"What
is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone,
men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For
whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man.
All things are connected."
~ Chief
Seattle
|
"The
bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most
destructive invention of the 20th century."
- Philip Shabecoff
|
|
"The
primary threat to nature and people today comes from
centralising and monopolising power and control. Not
until diversity is made the logic of production will
there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace.
Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in
our times: it is a survival imperative."
~ Vandana
Shiva
*
Uniformity
is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way.
~ Vandana
Shiva
|
|
Many
people are helping to make the world a better place,
but humanity as a whole is making it difficult for other
living creatures that share our planet to survive.
-- Robert
Alan Silverstein
|
 |
"What
is the nature of a species that knowingly and without good
reason exterminates another?"
- George Small
Once
species become extinct, no corrective legislation can bring
them back—they are gone forever.
- Allen M. Solomon
"Our
moral and ethical responsibility is to protect other species
in the spirit of husbandry rather than destroy them in and
attitude of conquest."
~ Charles Southwick
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, so that never again will
Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the
exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.
~Wallace Stegner
Even
if we act immediately, the world is doomed to lose many of
its animal and plant species and this inturn will reduce the
ability of ecosystems to deliver vital services to human populations.
The Red List gives all of us a practical tool for raising
awareness of the biodiversity crisis and for forging new partnerships
within the international community.
-- Achim Steiner, IUCN Director General
More
than 5,500 large dams impede America's running waters, leaving
less than 2 percent of the country's 3.1 million miles of
rivers and streams flowing free. In the wake of these river
alterations trails a record list of endangered aquatic species.
Two of every three freshwater mussel species are heading for
extinction, or are already there; half of all crayfish species
are imperiled; more than a third of the country's freshwater
fish are in trouble -- 17 of them missing outright.
-- William Stolzenburg
"Those
who wish to pet and baby wildlife love them, but those who
respect their natures and wish to let them live their natural
lives, love them more."
- Edwin Way Teale
"The
effects of human activities on biodiversity have increased
so greatly that the rate of species extinctions is rising
to hundreds or thousands of times the background level."
-- United Nations Earth Watch (UNEP)
"Without
habitat, there is no wildlife. It's that simple."
- Wildlife Habitat Canada
"An
Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium.
But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind
foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet
by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity."
-- E. O. Wilson
We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless
while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means
to humanity.
-- E. O. Wilson
"Plant
genetic resources are seldom 'raw materials'; they are
the expression of the current wisdom of farmers who
have played a highly significant role in the building
up of the world's genetic resource base... As is already
happening in my country, farmers and national genebanks
in developing countries can work together to preserve
and expand crop genetic diversity on behalf of all humanity."
~ Melaku
Worede
|
|
"The
world is currently undergoing a very rapid loss of biodiversity
comparable with the great mass extinction events that have
previously occurred only five or six times in the Earth's
history."
-- World Wildlife Fund
|
