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

“To restore stability to our planet, therefore, we must restore its biodiversity, the very thing we have removed. It is the only way out of this crisis that we ourselves have created. We must rewild the world!”
― David Attenborough

“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

“One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and, eventually, new species evolved to take their place. But for whatever reason—call it biophilia, call it care for God’s creation, call it heart-stopping fear—people are reluctant to be the asteroid. And so we’ve created another class of animals. These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back. The term of art for such creatures is “conservation-reliant,” though they might also be called “Stockholm species” for their utter dependence on their persecutors.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“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

“Other life-forms exist and have consciousness. Their lives give us a lot of food for nutrition and food for thought. We get food for our physical needs from plants, trees and farm animals. We are able to use some animals for our safety and travel. Even the microorganisms are important in decomposing waste and are a source of medicines and vaccines. In a way, these life-forms support our sustenance. Humans as consumers depend on nature for their sustenance more so than the plants which produce their own food and supply nutrients for other animals including humans.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“We cannot predict the behaviour of the whole, complex, connected system. We cannot know what will go wrong or right. However we can be absolutely certain that by reducing or destroying biodiversity, our world will be less able to adapt.”
― Bill Nye, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation

“Compassion can be lost as easily as species, and when it goes, then plants and animals are sure to follow. It is not enough simply to bequeath biodiversity to future generations without also passing on a sense of its significance and, perhaps hardest of all, a genuine love of life on Earth.”
― Charlie Elder, Few and Far Between: On The Trail of Britain's Rarest Animals

“It's by recognizing our flaws that we can strengthen them, recognizing where flowers came from that we can hope not to burn down the only home we ever knew.”
― Monaristw

“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