Biodiversity Quotes

“A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.”
― E. O. Wilson

“This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms-folded them into its genes-and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady.”
― E.O. Wilson

“The only biodiversity we’re going to have left is Coke versus Pepsi. We’re landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

“The same way biodiversity is important to biological ecosystems, business diversity is important to economic ecosystems. It's good to have an abundance of various kinds of businesses. This cultivates resilience in the system.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr, CEO of Mayflower-Plymouth

“Ethiopia is the center of origin and diversity for the majority of coffee we drink. The commodification of coffee pushes farmers to grow as much as possible by whatever means possible. This has contributed to deforestation. The place where coffee was born - the area with the greatest biodiversity of coffee anywhere in the world - could disappear. No forest, no coffee. No coffee, no forest. What we lose isn't specific to Ethiopia; it impacts us all.”
― Preeti Simran Sethi, Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love

“In time, extinction comes for all species. Some leave descendants. Others do not. Beautiful as the image is, there is no tree of life. The shape of biodiversity is more like a chaotic blanket, individual threads splitting, being snipped off, branching again, creating an incredible tangle of species that are both discrete and connected. All the species alive in this moment, at the dawn of the Paleogene, will eventually perish. But some will sprout populations a little different from their point of origin, variations that will survive even as their parent species disappear, and with them the same ecological dance will begin again. The species that exist today will shape what tomorrow looks like, life itself driving the profusion of so many unique forms.”
― Riley Black, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World

“Nature is the main protagonist in my book, not the people. Nature is also the main protagonist in our lives. It is largely unrepresented and voiceless. Until it screams. Then we have to pay attention.”
― Sadie Noni

“The activities of La Condamine, Humboldt, Wallace, Bates, and other such explorers touched on only the tiniest fraction of the vastness of a world so expansive as to be impervious to harm. But today, the Amazon River Basin, occupying more than 2.7 million square miles is at our fingertips and is considered one of the most ecologically threatened regions of the world.”
― Kurt Johnson, Nabokov's Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius

“the updated 2016 State of Nature report discovered that the UK has lost significantly more biodiversity over the long term than the world average. Ranked twenty-ninth lowest out of 218 countries, we are among the most nature-depleted countries in the world.”
― Isabella Tree, Wilding

“The science writer David Quammen puts it: 'When we disrupt ecosystems, we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts, and when they happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it. And so, they spillover from wild animal populations and into human ones.'

Perhaps COVID-19 will prove to be a wake-up call. We now have the most selfish of reasons to save biodiversity -- our own welfare.”
― Dan Saladino, Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

“It is not that species become extinct – all species will eventually become extinct. It is that we hasten extinction for so many species before we even know them or understand them, before we have grasped the way of the world and our place in it – when so much suffering could be avoided, with just a little pause and meditation on this journey of life.

We are not wiser than the animals we kill and the species we are driving to extinction. We are like rampaging bulls, goaded into action by forces we do not understand, trampling through fields full of priceless treasures. We are able to deviate from this thoughtless, violent mediocrity. We must if we are to survive.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“..we create a culture and language that necessarily assumes we are special. In the face of all the mounting evidence to the contrary, our culture and language suggest that we may be guilty of anthropomorphising life-forms that show us that the assumed ‘human’ qualities are not only human ones.

Talk about stacking the deck against other animals. It is an ugly Orwellian feedback loop. Any approach to truth is lost in a deep corruption of logic and language. This wrong-headedness and unfairness sits very deep within us and our culture; it is time to call it out so we can root it out.”
― Peter Pink-Howitt, Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity

“But what is the price of doing nothing, Guardian? And who bears it? You are a part of the whole, are you not? Like the trees, the orangutans, the tigers…Do not underestimate your power. You influence more than you think.”
― Sadie Noni, The Fires of Tanam Alkin

“Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, society needs cultural diversity to grow new possibilities. Monoculture deadens our collective potential. (Favianna Rodriguez, Harnessing Cultural Power)”
― Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

“It’s not a requirement to eat animals, we just chose to do it, so it becomes a moral choice and one that is having a huge impact on the planet, using up resources and destroying the biosphere.”
― James Cameron

“Planet Earth shelters millions of species. Myriad species have already gone extinct and yet, putting trust in the theory of evolution, we can expect many more species to come into existence in the future. Humans, like any other species, are just a by-product of an extremely long and eternal evolutionary process.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“Humans, like any other species, are just a by-product of an extremely long and eternal evolutionary process.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“I always say that the Earth is not our home, because the term "home" has the connotation of permanent ownership. Rather, it is a dormitory where we need to learn to live together by sharing with each other and caring for one another.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“As early humans moved about, they were accompanied by a whole entourage of creatures they had come to depend on, or learned to coexist with — not only their crop plants and domesticated animals, which they carried with them deliberately, but also the creatures that had adopted them during their lengthy process of developing agriculture and animal husbandry and building habitations and cities, roads and canals, seaports and fortifications. To quote Anderson [Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man, and Life:]

‘Unconsciously as well as deliberately man carries whole floras about the globe with him, he now lives surrounded by transported landscapes, and our commonest everyday plants have been transformed by their long associations with us so that many roadsides and dooryard plants are artifacts. An artifact, by definition, is something produced by man, something which we would not have if man had not come into being. That is what many of our weeds and crops really are.”
― Richard Orlando, Weeds in the Urban Landscape: Where They Come from, Why They're Here, and How to Live with Them

“Neither Superman nor Captain America is real. Real heroes who will save our planet are activists and biodiversity savers.”
― Hakan Kapucu

“Balancing the needs of human societies with the preservation of freshwater ecosystems requires a paradigm shift towards more sustainable water use. This involves reevaluating the environmental impact of large-scale water extraction projects, promoting water conservation practices, and investing in alternative water sources to alleviate pressure on natural habitats.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“The freshwater fish crisis is a manifestation of the complex interplay between climate change and a myriad of human-induced threats. Recognising the interconnectedness of these challenges is the first step towards crafting effective solutions.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“Throughout the over 200 years of the field of biogeography, its researchers have discovered some strikingly general patterns in biological diversity, and have advanced an equally intriguing set of explanations for the forces driving those patterns. Despite the many levels, qualitative features, and potential quantitative means of measuring biological diversity, the overwhelming majority of these studies have focused on just one or two relatively simple, but intuitively valuable measures—species richness and endemicity. Species richness is a simple count of the number of species in a particular area of interest (e.g. the number of fish in a pond, lake, or ocean basin). It is a direct, albeit simplistic expression of our innate value for the more complex. But our instinctive valuation of diversity is a bit more ecologically sophisticated than this, as it is also influenced by our apparently innate attraction to the rarest, most precious “gems” of the natural world.
A simple thought experiment should bear this out: given two assemblages with the same species richness—one comprising species common to most other ecosystems, and the other solely comprising endemics (so rare that they occur nowhere else), nearly all of us would be drawn to the latter assemblage because it has high endemicity. Beyond this instinctive attraction to the most rare, there clearly is a more pragmatic reason for valuing endemic species over the more broadly distributed (cosmopolitan) ones. If an endemic is lost from its assemblage, it disappears globally and the legacy of many thousands of generations of natural selection are irrevocably lost as well.”
― Mark V Lomolino, Biogeography: A Very Short Introduction

“Profits drive our society to humanities detriment.”
― Gun Gun Febrianza

“Ko sem tistega aprila sklonila glavo in prosila za dež, sem razumela, da kmetijstvo danes zahteva radikalno odločitev za popolno priredje. Kmetijstvo danes je vzpostavljanje zavesti, da med nadzorom in sodelovanjem zmeraj izbereš sodelovanje, kajti nadzor je utvara, ki ubija. Nič ne more nadzorovati narave. Nič izničiti njenih skrivnosti.”
― Nataša Kramberger, Po vsej sili živ

“Too many people just like me, who want to tramp in here with cameras, with backpacks, or with dirt bikes or mining licences, with cats and dogs and bulldozers and building permits, with a hankering for palm oil or rhino horn or rainforest timber, the seven billion of my own species. All of us with a terrible hunger. All of us with a ready narrative about why we deserve to get what we want.”
― Cate Kennedy

“One... misconception is the idea that England is now mostly concreted over. Coupled to this is the idea that the onward march of bricks and mortar is the main cause of declining species and habitats. Neither assertion is true. Just 8.8 per cent of England is built on; 73 per cent is farmland, and 10 per cent is forestry. The biggest drivers of biodiversity loss in this country are modern agriculture, forestry and shooting. ...the greatest threat to the countryside comes from within it.”
― Guy Shrubsole, The Lie of the Land: Who Really Cares for the Countryside?

“We came to regard the wild world as something to tame, to subdue, to use. There is no doubt that this new approach to life brought us spectacular gains, but
over the years, we lost our balance.
We moved from being a part of nature
to being apart from nature.”
― David Attenborough, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future

“Humans were designed to be the choir directors of creation's praises to God... And the tremendous biodiversity of creation lends rich harmonies to this choir's praise of our Creator. The greater the ecological diversity, the greater potential to maximize praise.”
― Rachel G. Jordan, If the Ocean Has a Soul: A Marine Biologist's Pursuit of Truth through Deep Waters of Faith and Science

“I'm not a vegetarian, I could eat anything if it's well cooked and tastes good, but preservation of wildlife is nonnegotiable, because it is only by preserving biodiversity, that we ensure a sustainable planet for humanity. It is one thing to consume animals for food, and another to destroy entire ecosystems for profit. There is nothing wrong in development, but development founded on destruction of nature, is the most expensive ticket to human extinction.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat