Biodiversity Loss Quotes

Even if we could grow our way out of the crisis and delay the inevitable and painful reconciliation of virtual and real wealth, there is the question of whether this would be a wise thing to do. Marginal costs of additional growth in rich countries, such as global warming, biodiversity loss and roadways choked with cars, now likely exceed marginal benefits of a little extra consumption. The end result is that promoting further economic growth makes us poorer, not richer.

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises — car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change. When the crisis is environmental and global,

Humanity should not remain insensitive to the forest fire or wildfire every year. Unless we act, the loss of biodiversity and extinction of herbs, birds and animals and the pains of the trees, birds, animals and the poor is also alarming signal for the extinction of humanity itself.

He knew that sick land meant a sick society, that the loss of biodiversity meant the end of life

And why do we measure the progress of economies by gross domestic product? GDP is simply the total annual value of all goods and services transacted in a country. It rises not only when lives get better and economies progress but also when bad things happen to people or to the environment. Higher alcohol sales, more driving under the influence, more accidents, more emergency-room admissions, more injuries, more people in jail—GDP goes up. More illegal logging in the tropics, more deforestation and biodiversity loss, higher timber sales—again, GDP goes up. We know better, but we still worship high annual GDP growth rate, regardless of where it comes from.

Human beings are often at their best when responding to immediate crises — car accidents, house fires, hurricanes. We are less effective in the face of enormous but slow-moving crises such as the loss of biodiversity or climate change.

eating less meat would reduce the amount of land we use for farming, climate change and biodiversity loss.

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.

It is through the sheer mass of society, not simply from malevolence, that the rising human tide has become deadly to the rest of life. The collective weight of a bloated humanity has dire ecological and social consequences. Every pressing problem, from poverty and malnutrition to biodiversity loss and climate change, is linked to human numbers and behaviour. In aggregate, the prosaic actions of people—eating, manufacturing, polluting, shopping, warring—have made our species the functional equivalent of a geological force, able to affect even the global life support systems and climate in which our species evolved.

Lack of accountability weakens the environmental and health rights of citizens; it damages peace- building and reconciliation initiatives; impedes the implementation of global health policies; leads to the loss of ecosystems and biodiversity; and weakens democracy, justice, human rights, and international security.

Food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions; it uses half of the world’s habitable land, 70% of the world’s freshwater withdrawals, and the leading driver of biodiversity loss.

Taste” is a noun and a verb: We all have it and we all do it. But we don’t all have a language or a system for understanding and expressing that experience… I knew chocolate was something I didn’t want to lose, but I didn’t have the words to communicate why it was so important to me, or the knowledge on how best to save it. Now I do.

The modern combination of habitat destruction coupled with species introductions is, therefore, likely to result in total biodiversity loss that may be even greater than that experienced during the [End-Permian mass extinction].” The full terrifying weight of this statement will become apparent after the next chapter.

I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change…I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy…and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that. —GUS SPETH, environmental lawyer and scientist

Those who believe that the End of Days is just around the corner have no reason to be concerned about matters like climate change, groundwater depletion, or loss of biodiversity.3 If there is no future, conservation of any kind is, paradoxically, wasteful.

You see the impact of humans on Earth’s environment every day. We are trashing the place: There is plastic along our highways, the smell of a landfill, the carbonic acid (formed when carbon dioxide is dissolved in water) bleaching of coral reefs, the desertification of enormous areas of China and Africa (readily seen in satellite images), and a huge patch of plastic garbage in the Pacific Ocean. All of these are direct evidence of our effect on our world. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate. Many people naïvely (and some, perhaps, deceptively) argue that loss of species is not that important. After all, we can see in the fossil record that about 99 percent of all the different kinds of living things that have ever lived here are gone forever, and we’re doing just fine today. What’s the big deal if we, as part of the ecosystem, kill off a great many more species of living things? We’ll just kill what we don’t need or notice. The problem with that idea is that although we can, in a sense, know what will become or what became of an individual species, we cannot be sure of what will happen to that species’ native ecosystem. We cannot predict the behavior 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. Our farms will be less productive, our water less clean, and our landscape more barren. We will have fewer genetic resources to draw on for medicines, for industrial processes, for future crops. Biodiversity is a result of the process of evolution, and it is also a safety net that helps keep that process going. In order to pass our own genes into the future and enable our offspring to live long and prosper, we must reverse the current trend and preserve as much biodiversity as possible. If we don’t, we will sooner or later join the fossil record of extinction.

Embedded in every conversation about feeding people, conserving natural resources and ensuring a a healthy diet, both now and in the future, is the threat of the loss of agricultural biodiversity—the reduction of diversity in everything that makes food and agriculture possible, a shift that is the direct result of our relationship with the world around us.

Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse effect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned. Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness. Imagine the problem is not physical and no amount of driving, no amount of road will deal with the problem. Imagine that the problem is not that we are powerless or that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act. We hear whispers of the future but we slap our hands against our ears, we catch glimpses but turn our faces swiftly aside.

Like the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria or the supremely ignorant incineration of stacks of invaluable Mayan codices, the loss of knowledge we are experiencing as the last of the traditional elders pass from this physical plane of existence without heirs to their knowledge- as well as the very environment in which sacred plants grow- is a tragedy occurring right now as you read these lines, one that could well be beyond redemption.

But her no leather - no fur policy drew fire. Critics charged that faux hides, many of which are petroleum based, were more damaging to the earth than the real stuff. Bull, said McCartney. "Livestock production is one of the major causes of ... global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity", she shot back, with more than fifty million animals farme and slaughtered each year just to make handbags and shoes. Conventional leather tanning employs heavy metals such as chromium, which results in waste that is toxic to humans.

To retrieve a vision of the world as whole—through sustained attention to the underlying unity that connects all beings to one another and to the root causes in our thought and practice that contribute to the deepening fragmentation of self, community, and world—is necessary to the work of healing that is at the heart of any sustained ecological renewal. We are now facing the very real possibility that such a vision of the whole has been rendered unimaginable and unrealizable by the sheer range and extent of the ecological degradation we have visited upon the world. One of the most potent and enduring images of our precarious condition to have emerged from the literature of ecology during the past twenty-five years—of the world as an archipelago of ecologically impoverished islands—suggests that fragmentation is a fundamental reality with which we must now contend.6 This image of widespread ecological fragmentation—one that reflects the increasingly evident loss of biodiversity and ecological integrity throughout the world—raises serious questions about whether it is still meaningful to speak of cultivating a vision of the whole, and whether any spiritual practice can help to mend this torn fabric.

This might be perhaps the simplest single-paragraphy summation of civilizational advances, a concise summary of growth that matters most. Our ability to provide a reliable, adequate food supply thanks to yields an order of magnitude higher than in early agricultures has been made possible by large energy subsidies and it has been accompanied by excessive waste. A near-tripling of average life expectancies has been achieved primarily by drastic reductions of infant mortality and by effective control of bacterial infections. Our fastest mass-travel speeds are now 50-150 times higher than walking. Per capita economic product in affluent countries is roughly 100 times larger than in antiquity, and useful energy deployed per capita is up to 200-250 times higher. Gains in destructive power have seen multiples of many (5-11) orders of magnitude. And, for an average human, there has been essentially an infinitely large multiple in access to stored information, while the store of information civilization-wide will soon be a trillion times larger than it was two millenia ago. And this is the most worrisome obverse of these advances: they have been accompanied by a multitude of assaults on the biosphere. Foremost among them has been the scale of the human claim on plants, including a significant reduction of the peak posts-glacial area of natural forests (on the order of 20%), mostly due to deforestation in temperate and tropical regions; a concurrent expansion of cropland to cover about 11% of continental surfaces; and an annual harvest of close to 20% of the biosphere's primary productivity (Smil 2013a). Other major global concerns are the intensification of natural soil erosion rates, the reduction of untouched wilderness areas to shrinking isolated fragments, and a rapid loss of biodiversity in general and within the most species-rich biomes in particular. And then there is the leading global concern: since 1850 we have emitted close to 300 Gt of fossil carbon to the atmosphere (Boden and Andres 2017). This has increased tropospheric CO2 concentrations from 280 ppm to 405 ppm by the end of 2017 and set the biosphere on a course of anthropogenic global warming (NOAA 2017). These realities clearly demonstrate that our preferences have not been to channel our growing capabilities either into protecting the biosphere or into assuring decent prospects for all newborns and reducing life's inequalities to tolerable differences. Judging by the extraordinary results that are significantly out of line with the long-term enhancements of our productive and protective abilities, we have preferred to concentrate disproportionately on multiplying the destructive capacities of our weapons and, even more so, on enlarging our abilities for the mass-scale acquisition and storage of information and for instant telecommunication, and have done so to an extent that has become not merely questionable but clearly counterproductive in many ways.

There are big things to worry about and the issues like climate change, hunger, poverty, violence, biodiversity loss, unemployment, racism, and war are not going to be solved easily. But despite their grim predictions, I am hopeful. I am already seeing the light. A rustle of wind in the grass makes me dream.

The Great Work is spiritual at the core. Gus Speth, an environmental attorney, ecologist, and climate advocate, has summarized the problem brilliantly: “I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. . . . But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.

Conservation biologists John Terborgh and Jim Estes consider loss of top predators from ecosystems worldwide due to persecution by humans a crisis as significant as climate change. They suggest that as with climate change, the problem of loss of biodiversity caused by loss of keystones will only worsen until we take measures to correct it. While restoring keystones will not solve all our problems, it will create more resilient systems, help restore and maintain biodiversity, and heal some of the damage we have done to this Earth.

The drifting of continents—now universally accepted as plate tectonics—is far too gradual for humans to perceive. The same is true for other highly significant phenomena. When Charles Darwin first proposed natural selection, he faced at least as much resistance as Wegener; although his theory explained myriad observations, nobody had actually seen finches evolving. Likewise, the effects of our own collective activity—such as climate change and loss of biodiversity—are almost invisible to us, because the impact spans the whole planet, growing over centuries. Like plate tectonics and evolution, the arrival of the Anthropocene epoch is not a human-scale phenomenon. Buckminster Fuller conceived the Geoscope as a tool to help humans attain a global perspective, to see worldwide events and to probe geological time. It was to be an instrument for scoping Earth’s patterns—an instrument of comprehensive anticipatory design science. And though it was never built adjacent to the United Nations, he always carried one in his head. In order to anticipate comprehensively, the present-day design scientist must do as he did. Design scientists must be sensitive to natural patterns of change and human patterns of activity, extrapolating from fragmentary evidence. In the Anthropocene, these patterns will be interrelated. And since human activity is the driving force, they not only can be observed but also can be impacted. However, patterns must be detected before they become settled, before the consequences are foregone conclusions. Unlike Wegener and Darwin, the design scientist cannot be passive. There

The World Bank also warned when it released its report that “we’re on track for a 4°C warmer world [by century’s end] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.

that meat production is the second or third largest contributor to environmental problems at every level and at every scale, from global to local. It is a primary culprit in land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, species extinction, loss of biodiversity, and climate change.

Another expert, David Jablonski, characterizes mass extinctions as “substantial biodiversity losses” that occur rapidly and are “global in extent.

A 2006 report by the Livestock, Environment and Development Initiative reported that the livestock industry is one of the largest contributors to environmental degradation worldwide, contributing to air and water pollution, land degradation, climate change and loss of biodiversity.

The layers of crises and cruelty we face will not be solved with technological, political, or economic strategies alone. A deeper transformation of heart is necessary to welcome in a new story. Moving away from a worldview and a way of life that treats others as a “collection of objects” toward a new way of being human that participates honorably in a vast “communion of subjects” is what Thomas Berry calls “the Great Work.”4 The Great Work is spiritual at the core. Gus Speth, an environmental attorney, ecologist, and climate advocate, has summarized the problem brilliantly: “I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. . . . But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”5

What does it mean to occupy the complex position of "mother," principally responsible for bringing life into a fallen world? From a place of disequilibrium and periodic depression, in the context of multiple threats and interrelating crises, like many parents - like my own parents, and their parents before them - I struggled. I'm struggling still, to raise my children to thrive without coming undone. There is no linear narrative for what we're living through, another friend recently said. How to make meaning by reading the signs of the times? In the United States of America, our narrative of progress is in deep crisis, connected to the failure of society and culture to make sense of our history of genocide and slavery, which have led to ecocide and biodiversity loss. This book is unified by my search for "lessons for survival" in dark times, my devotion to exploring, and my ongoing interests in the meaning of home, the relationship of the inner city to the city, the common good, public space, public art, small acts of witness, social and environmental justice, and the radical potential of mothering.

As I dug into the research for this book and learned about the ripple effects of women leading and having equal rights, equal pay, equal education, and equal say, it became apparent that empowering women is singularly one of the most important solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss - and that fact is not being talked about enough.

I wanted to help rescue this species from endangerment by learning about the elephants’ intricate social structure, increasing worldwide attention to this species through my research and scientific advancements in knowledge. However, when the scientific papers that I had spent years writing finally came out, there was little reaction. I felt proud of my scientific accomplishments but was sad that I wasn’t doing more for the species that I cared about so much. The following year after I graduated, a new paper by one of my colleagues in Gabon found that between 2002-2011, the duration of my Ph.D. plus a few years, over 60% of the entire forest elephant population declined due to poaching[5]. The poaching was almost exclusively driven by the consumption of their tusks as sources for carving statues, jewelry, and other decorative objects. The true conservation issue had nothing to do with studying the elephants themselves. What was the point of studying a species if it might not exist in a few decades?  If I really wanted to help forest elephants, I should have been studying the people, the consumers who were purchasing ivory to determine if there were ways to change attitudes towards ivory and purchasing behavior. Yes, having rangers on the ground to protect parks and elephants is important, but if there is no decrease in demand, it will constantly be an uphill battle. All of the solutions to the conservation problems of forest elephants are social, political, and economic first.  If you are interested in pursuing wildlife biology as a career for conservation purposes (like I was) or because you love animals (also me), you might be better suited in another career if research is not your thing but can still work for a conservation organization. Nonprofits need lawyers, financial planners, fundraising experts, and marketing executives to name a few. When I perused the job boards of nonprofit organizations, I was surprised by how few research positions there were. There were far more in fundraising, marketing, and development. Even if you don’t work directly for conservation, honestly, you can still make a difference and help conservation efforts in other ways outside of your career. A lot of conservation is really about investing in programs and habitat, so species stay protected. For example, if you can purchase and/or donate money to organizations that buy large areas of land, this land can be set aside for wildlife conservation. The biggest threat to wildlife is habitat loss and simply buying more land, keeping it undeveloped, and/or restoring it for species to live on, is one of the major means to solve the biodiversity crisis.

By elevating the conservation status of supposedly pristine parts of nature, and disregarding the rest – the new wild – conservationists end up complicit in forest destruction and biodiversity loss. *

It is debateable that there are larger and more pressing issues that the greatest systemic exploitation and slaughter of trillions of animals a year. The climate change, loss of biodiversity, pollution and antibiotic resistance as well as potential for zoonotic pandemics, cost to public health are large issues of a magnitude it is hard to match.

Many seed savers see themselves as stewards, not only of their own family memories but of the shared stories and genetic codes contained within these plants. This kind of recollection works against collective forgetting and the widespread disappearance of so many agricultural plants and animals. Old localized, traditional varieties of plants and animals fell (or were pushed) out of everyday use as agriculture became increasingly large scale, industrialized, and standardized, relying on ever fewer varieties in order to achieve the high levels of uniformity and predictability expected not only by stockholders but also by grocery store shoppers. The loss of biodiversity also means a broader form of forgetting.

We need to engage in a comprehensive and collaborative effort on a global scale, driven by a shared commitment to preserve the delicate balance of our planet’s ecosystems. The cost of inaction is not merely the loss of biodiversity but the unravelling of the intricate web of life that sustains us all.

Global systemic risks—climate change, biodiversity loss, deepening inequality, and rising authoritarianism—are converging into what’s being called a polycrisis. While ecological overshoot is one root cause of this polycrisis, equally implicated is financial overshoot: the accumulation of too much financial wealth, even as the system remains intent on a limitless more.

Inextricably linked to the climate emergency is a broader environmental crisis. A third of the Earth’s land is now acutely degraded, with fertile soil being lost at a rate of 24 billion tonnes a year through intensive farming.[19] Generating three centimetres of top soil takes 1,000 years, and, the UN said in 2014, if current rates of degradation continue all of the world's top soil could be gone within 60 years.[20] 95% of our food presently comes from the soil. Unless new approaches are adopted, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only a quarter of the level in 1960. The equivalent of 30 football pitches of soil are being lost every minute. Heavy tilling, monocropping multiple harvests and abundant use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the expense of long-term sustainability. Agriculture is actually the number one reason for deforestation. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled, often leading to land abandonment and desertification. Decreasing productivity has been observed, due to diminished fertility, on 20% of the world’s cropland, 16% of forest land, 19% of grassland, and 27% of rangeland. Furthermore, tropical forests have become a source rather than a sink of carbon.[21] Forest areas in South America, Africa and Asia – which have until recently played a crucial role in absorbing GHG – are now releasing 425 teragrams of carbon annually, more than all the traffic in the US. This is due to the thinning of tree density and culling of biodiversity, reducing biomass by up to 75%. Scientists combined 12 years of satellite data with field studies. They found a net carbon loss on every continent. Latin America – home to the world’s biggest forest, the Amazon, which is responsible for 20% of its oxygen – accounted for nearly 60% of the emissions, while 24% came from Africa and 16% from Asia. Every year about 18 million hectares of forest – an area the size of England and Wales – is felled. In just 40 years, possibly one billion hectares, the equivalent of Europe, has been torn down. Half the world’s rainforests have been razed in a century and they will vanish altogether at current rates within another. Earth’s “sixth mass extinction”[22] is well underway: up to 50% of all individual animals have been lost in recent decades and almost half of land mammals have lost 80% of their range in the last century. Vertebrate populations have fallen by an average of 60% since the 1970s, and in some countries there has been an even faster decline of insects – vital, of course, for aerating the soil, pollinating blossoms, and controlling insect and plant pests.

The cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists featured in this book have convinced me that we are living at a remarkable moment in human history. At the same time they’ve been working hard to document the different cultural understandings of mental illness and health, those differences have been disappearing before their eyes. I’ve come to think of them as psychology’s version of botanists in the rain forest, desperate to document the diversity while staying only a few steps ahead of the bulldozers. We should worry about this loss of diversity in the world’s differing conceptions and treatments of mental illness in exactly the same way we worry about the loss of biological diversity in nature. Modes of healing and culturally specific beliefs about how to achieve mental health can be lost to humanity with the grim finality of an animal or plant lapsing into extinction. And like those plants and animals, the diversity in the human understanding of the mind can disappear before we’ve truly comprehended its value. Biologists suggest that within the dense and vital biodiversity of the rain forest are chemical compounds that may someday cure modern plagues. Similarly, within the diversity of different cultural understandings of mental health and illness may exist knowledge that we cannot afford to lose. We erase this diversity at our own peril.

In fact, we have only speeded up extinction in the last 50 years when the science has been on its peak. Morals do not come from evolutionary biology. Towards that end, it is the depressing story of survival upon survival through destruction upon destruction. No wonder we are now seeing tremendous loss to ecology, environment, bio-diversity and forests after setting aside values and morals.

While the concept of Tawheed creates an equal basis for humans to use what is bestowed in nature, the concept of Khilafah instils stewardship towards the responsible use of natural and environmental resources without pushing planetary boundaries and causing precious loss of biodiversity.

many of the alien plants that have succeeded in North America are not a random sample of all plants that evolved elsewhere, but rather are a subset that were imported specifically because of their unpalatability to insects

It's not becoming abundantly clear that the way most of us currently eat is not sustainable -- either for the planet or for human health. The signs that modern food is unsustainable are all around us, whether you want to measure the problem in soil erosion, in the fact that so many farmers cannot make a living from producing food, or from the rising numbers of children having all their teeth extracted because of their sugary diet. Food is the single greatest user of water and one of the greatest drivers of the loss of biodiversity. We cannot carry on eating as we are without causing irreparable harm to ourselves and the environment.

Abundant data support the importance of biodiversity in health, and its loss causes various inflammatory conditions, including asthma, allergic and inflammatory bowel diseases, type 1 diabetes, liver disease, obesity, and much more.

Ecopsychologists have shown that the practice of gratitude puts brakes on hyperconsumption. The relationships nurtured by gift thinking diminish our sense of scarcity and want. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver. Climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss are the consequences of unrestrained taking by humans. Might cultivation of gratitude be part of the solution?