Conservation

Sourced

• Agriculture represents the single most profound ecological change in the entire 3.5 billion-year history of life.
  • Niles Eldredge, "The Sixth Extinction", 2001

• Indeed, to develop agriculture is essentially to declare war on ecosystems — converting land to produce one or two food crops, with all other native plant species all now classified as unwanted 'weeds' — and all but a few domesticated species of animals now considered as pests.
  • Niles Eldredge, "The Sixth Extinction", 2001

• There is little doubt left in the minds of professional biologists that Earth is currently faced with a mounting loss of species that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past.
  • Niles Eldredge, "The Sixth Extinction", 2001

• This explosion of human population, especially in the post-Industrial Revolution years of the past two centuries, coupled with the unequal distribution and consumption of wealth on the planet, is the underlying cause of the Sixth Extinction.
  • - Niles Eldredge, "The Sixth Extinction", 2001

• The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. If we save a priceless woodland today, it is threatened from another quarter tomorrow.
  • Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998), quoted in Facing Florida's Environmental Future, April 1990.

• The conservationist's most Important task, if we are to save the earth, is to educate.
  • Peter Scott, founder chairman of the World Wildlife Federation, quoted in the Sunday Telegraph, November 6, 1986.

• Civilization began around wetlands; today's civilization has every reason to leave them wet and wild.
  • Edward Maltby, Waterlogged Wealth, 1986.

• By 2050, at bio-extinction's current rate, between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of all species will have disappeared or be too few in numbers to survive. There'll be a few over-visited parks, the coral reefs will be beaten up, grasslands overgrazed. Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas.
  • Stuart L. Pimm, "Mass Extinction Not Inevitable", circa 2004.

• More than a billion women around the world want to emulate western women’s lifestyles and are rapidly acquiring the material ability to do so. It is therefore vital that in our leadership we display some reserve and responsibility in our spending so that the world’s finite resources will be available for our children, their children and their children’s children.
  • Louise Burfitt-Dons, Speech on Hot Women Campaign given at UK Aware circa 2008.

Misattributed

• I, as Governor, declare the Endangered Species Act is no longer in force in Wyoming. […] I, as Governor, declare, effective immediately, any animal classified as a "predator" under Wyoming law has no protection. This specifically applies to the wolf. Wyoming statute also says that dogs harassing wildlife shall be shot. Wyoming now considers the wolf as a federal dog.
  • supposedly from Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal
  • actually an April Fool's joke by Maury Jones, an Afton, Wyoming conservationist, published on April 1, 2005 [1]
  • erroneously quoted as if factual by the Los Angeles Times on December 27, 2005 [2]

See also

• Environment