Biodiversity Quotes

I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each.

A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth's climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them.

In my world, you don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children...The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.

The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.” A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.

The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors. They all need to go on safari together.

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.

Architects are now on the look for materials and substances that can enhance biodiversity and rewild living systems.

The human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter as briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves.

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.

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!

Let's put heterogeneity over homogeneity. We need to design materials that can restore or rewild biodiversity on the planet. When ecosystems are more diverse, they are better able to perform essential ecosystem services like carbon sequestration.

Just as the natural environment depends on biodiversity, so the human environment depends on cultural diversity, because no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind.

Every problem that we have in society has a suite of relative solutions that are also business opportunities. Agricultural waste is a problem. But solving that problem is a business opportunity. Energy inefficiency is a problem. But solving that problem is a business opportunity. The abusive treatment of animals is a problem. But solving that problem is a business opportunity. Reduced biodiversity is a problem. But solving that problem is a business opportunity. Plastic waste in the ocean is a problem. But solving that problem is a business opportunity. And the list goes on indefinitely. We just have to think creatively and fluidly and we can solve all of these problems that plague Earth and we can grow businesses and earn money and provide for our families in the process.

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.

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.

biodiversity actually begins in the soil.

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.

The bottom line answer to the question about why biodiversity matters is fairly simple: The rest of the living world can get along without us, but we can’t get along without them.

One of the great themes of nature is abundance. One of the great themes of every city should also be abundance. In every city, there should be an abundance of opportunities, an abundance of food, an abundance of available homes, an abundance of biodiversity, an abundance of spaces to play.

Cities that prioritize being in harmony with nature, experience a variety of benefits including less waste, less crime, less mental health problems, a greater sense of community among residents, greater biodiversity, and so much more. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we are providing solutions to help cities improve along these lines.

Mother Earth is our first teacher. She has informed us that oneness does not equal sameness. She shows us this through the harmonious balance that is held in the rich biodiversity that exists within our world. To achieve oneness we must transcend our differences and embrace the integration of every individual aspect of humanity into the whole, knowing that all healthy systems are comprised of complexity and an abundance of diversity.

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.

There is no solution available, I assure you, to save Earth's biodiversity other than the preservation of natural environments in reserves large enough to maintain wild populations sustainably. Only Nature can serve as the planetary ark.

One gram of moss from the forest floor, a piece about the size of a muffin, would harbour 150,000 protozoa, 132,000 tardigrades, 3,000 springtails, 800 rotifers, 500 nematodes, 400 mites, and 200 fly larvae. These numbers tell us something about the astounding quantity of life in a handful of moss.

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

The ones who claim the universe is a dark forest where you either kill or be killed, using safety and security as excuses to maintain the status quo of archaic brains no longer useful in progressive, advanced societies. In my homeland, there was a time when the Virunga National Park wasn’t shrouded in darkness, but was the living, breathing heart of the Congo, with its rich biodiversity and ecological beauty. Non-human hearts of every shape and size shared its gifts. Our forests were never dark before the greed of men came to cast a shadow. Even the cunning leopard, stealthy and powerful, only claimed the life it needed to sustain itself. You may belong in a dark forest, but our worlds and our universes are not one, so get out of our way! Our forests are big hearted and so are we.

There are some things in the world we can't change - gravity, entropy, the speed of light, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and well being. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere.

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.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science.

thriving depends on more than meeting basic physical needs, and includes goods like a sense of community, mutual support, and equality. Wealth is much more than what GDP measures, and the market is not the only source of economic value. She urges policymakers to recognize the values of common lands, green space, biodiversity.

The greater the biodiversity, the more secure will be all life on Earth,

The fourth and final explanation for the rich biodiversity of cities is the sheer diversity of habitat patches.

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.

I love nature dearly and all creatures that contribute to make it what it is. I see the beauty in all expressions of life, and I see how blind so many of us still are. Our planet is remarkably abundant and there's more than enough for us all.It is greed and shortsightedness that create the illusion of scarcity.

[The keepers of Indigenous knowledge carry thousands of years of data on things such as medicinal plant properties, biodiversity, migration patterns, climate changes, astronomical events, and quantum physics.

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.

Look at the kind of people who most object to the childishness and cheapness of celebrity culture. Does one really want to side with such apoplectic and bombastic bores? I should know, I often catch myself being one, and it isn’t pretty. I will defend the absolute value of Mozart over Miley Cyrus, of course I will, but we should be wary of false dichotomies. You do not have to choose between one or the other. You can have both. The human cultural jungle should be as varied and plural as the Amazonian rainforest. We are all richer for biodiversity. We may decide that a puma is worth more to us than a caterpillar, but surely we can agree that the habitat is all the better for being able to sustain each. Monocultures are uninhabitably dull and end as deserts.

Though Indigenous peoples comprise only about 5 percent of the global population, our lands hold approximately 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity and an estimated 40 to 50 percent of the remaining protected places in the world.

n the wake of catastrophes, fungal diversity helps restore devastated habitats. Evolutionary trends generally lead to increased bio-diversity. However, due to human activities we are losing many species before we can even identify them. In effect, as we lose species, we are experiencing devolution--turning back the clock on biodiversity, which is a slippery slope toward massive ecological collapse. The interconnectedness of life is an obvious truth that we ignore at our peril.

Jonathan Sacks; “One way is just to think, for instance, of biodiversity. The extraordinary thing we now know, thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life, everything, all the three million species of life and plant life—all have the same source. We all come from a single source. Everything that lives has its genetic code written in the same alphabet. Unity creates diversity. So don’t think of one God, one truth, one way. Think of one God creating this extraordinary number of ways, the 6,800 languages that are actually spoken. Don’t think there’s only one language within which we can speak to God. The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation. When Moses at the burning bush says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.”Those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning, Don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. One of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. Don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.

the center of the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Biodiversity, there’s an exhibit embedded in the floor. The exhibit is arranged around a central plaque that notes there have been five major extinction events since complex animals evolved, over five hundred million years ago. According to the plaque, “Global climate change and other causes, probably including collisions between earth and extraterrestrial objects,” were responsible for these events. It goes on to observe: “Right now we are in the midst of the Sixth Extinction, this time caused solely by humanity’s transformation of the ecological landscape.

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.

Methane emissions are lower in biodiverse pasture systems largely because of fumaric acid – a compound that scientists at the Rowett Institute in Aberdeen identified as leading to faster growth and reducing emissions of methane by 70 per cent when added to the diet of lambs. Fumaric acid occurs widely in many plants and herbs of the field and hedgerow, including angelica, common fumitory, shepherd’s purse and bird’s-foot trefoil.

Regenerative agriculture therefore implies more than just sustaining something but rather an active rebuilding or regeneration of existing systems towards full health. It also implies an open-ended process of ongoing improvement and positive transformation. This can encompass the rebuilding or regeneration of soil itself, and of biodiversity more widely; the reduction of toxins and pollutants; the recharging of aquifers; the production of healthier food, clean water and air; the replacement of external inputs; and the enhancement of social capital and ecological knowledge.

I’m saying that mushrooms are very clever at surveying a landscape and taking a long-term view of the health of the population of the descendent organisms that give rise to the forest, that create the debris fields, that feed the fungi, that help the fungi’s own progeny live downstream. They take a very advanced view of ecosystem health and management, trying to increase soil depth, and, by increasing soil depth and the richness of the soil, to increase the carrying capacity of the ecosystem. Higher carrying capacity leads to more biodiversity, more sustainability, more resiliency.

The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data...which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.

These constantly arriving foreign inhabitants form the first of at least four explanations for the high biodiversity urban naturalists are encountering in their cities. A second explanation is the fact that the places where people like to build their settlements, which then grow into cities, are often biologically rich areas to begin with.

The whole new layer on top of what I was thinking about in the nineteen-seventies is climate change,” Lovejoy told me. He has written that “in the face of climatic change, even natural climatic change, human activity has created an obstacle course for the dispersal of biodiversity,” the result of which could be “one of the greatest biotic crises of all time.

Eliminate one species, and another increases in number to take its place

In planting trees, aim to perpetuate an ecosystem, not a plantation.

When I’m critical of modern approaches to ecology, I’m really trying to remind my reader of the long relationship that Western civilization has had to these forests that define the fringe of its place of habitation, and that this relationship is one that has a rich history of symbolism and imagination and myth and literature. So much of the Western imagination has projected itself into this space that when you lose a forest, you’re losing more than just the natural phenomenon or biodiversity; you’re also losing the great strongholds of cultural memory. (Source: discussing "Deforestation in a Civilized World.")

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.

fanfiction has become wildly more biodiverse than the canonical works that it springs from. It encompasses male pregnancy, centaurification, body swapping, apocalypses, reincarnation, and every sexual fetish, kink, combination, position, and inversion you can imagine and a lot more that you could but would probably prefer not to. It breaks down walls between genders and genres and races and canons and bodies and species and past and future and conscious and unconscious and fiction and reality. Culturally speaking, this work used to be the job of the avant garde, but in many ways fanfiction has stepped in to take on that role.

If we treat our forests right, we can at least ameliorate the declines in forest extent and diversity and the consequent impoverishment of the aesthetic, economic, climatic, and spiritual benefits we count on from them.

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.

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.

To quote Sarah Connor: ‘You’re all dead already.’ You, your friends, your customers—all of you. You poisoned your own planet, destroyed its climate, defiled its ecosystem, and killed off all of its biodiversity.” He pointed at each of us. “You’re going to be extinct soon, too, by your hands. And you know it. That’s why most of you spend every second you can wired up to the OASIS. You’ve already given up, and now you’re all just waiting around to die.

We can talk all we want about conservation biology and about the use of science to measure biodiversity,45 but in the real, physical world the real, physical effects of science on real, living nonhumans has been nothing short of atrocious.

For life to truly thrive on this planet, there must be immense biodiversity. Only when billions of different individual organisms make the most of every resource and opportunity they encounter, and millions of species lead lives that interlock so that they sustain each other, can the planet run efficiently. The greater the biodiversity, the more secure will be all life on Earth, including ourselves. Yet the way we humans are now living on Earth is sending biodiversity into a decline.

Our presence is not inherently evil and undesirable; it just has to be at the right scale, speed, and design. We can be an expression of biodiversity as worthy as any other species with whom we have co-evolved; we have a place and a vibrant role to play in ecosystems. It is our wild excess of procreation, ill-considered consumption priorities, and unbridled frenzy of activity that drowns the possibilities and existence of individuals from other species. That is where we have gone wrong.

To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is to insult superstition. It might be unwarranted to believe in leprechauns, but at least the person who holds to such a belief isn’t watching them not exist, for every waking hour of the day. Human inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity, is constantly on display, as people exhibit their variations in gender, ethnicity, physical attractiveness, size and shape, strength, health, agility, charm, humor, wit, industriousness, and sociability, among countless other features, traits, abilities, and aspects of their personality, some immediately and conspicuously, some only slowly, over time. To absorb even the slightest fraction of all this and to conclude, in the only way possible, that it is either nothing at all, or a ‘social construct’ and index of oppression, is sheer Gnostic delirium: a commitment beyond all evidence to the existence of a true and good world veiled by appearances. People are not equal, they do not develop equally, their goals and achievements are not equal, and nothing can make them equal. Substantial equality has no relation to reality, except as its systematic negation. Violence on a genocidal scale is required to even approximate to a practical egalitarian program, and if anything less ambitious is attempted, people get around it (some more competently than others).

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.

For a protector of life, who is moved by the diversity of life (biodiversity), it is unthinkable that the whole Earth should belong only to one animal species, humanity. Look at man, this person will say: look at him in Bosnia, Palestine, Rwanda, Kurdistan; or look at him in Finland, engaging in inheritance disputes or phone sex or the trade union movement: is man above all other forms of life? Does man have the right to rule the destiny of millions of basically similar species? Is man the living image of God?

Climate change is inviting us to forge a different kind of relationship, one that holds the planet and all of its places, ecosystems, and species sacred - not only in our conception and philosophy, but in our material relationship. Nothing less will deliver us from the environmental crisis that we face. Specifically, we need to turn our primary attention toward healing soil, water, and biodiversity, region by region and place by place... We must enact a civilization-wide unifying purpose: to restore beauty, health, and life to all that has suffered during the Ascent of Humanity.

The Philippines is also home to world-renowned natural wonders like an underground river and rice terraces, incredible diving spots rich in biodiversity, colorful public transportation, unique cuisine, vibrant festivals that showcase its colorful culture, and friendly locals regarded as some of the happiest in the world.

The Earth’s last forests, rainforests, wetlands, grasslands and woodlands are, in fact, priceless. They are the carbon stores that we cannot afford to unlock. They offer environmental services that we cannot do without. They are home to biodiversity that we must not lose. How can we come to represent all that in our value systems?

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.

Nature follows the way of the celestial immortals, the never-failing source of inspiration, the eternal masters of this and all sacred medicine traditions.

Nearly every historic fruit and vegetable variety once found in the United States has disappeared.

I see what you’re saying about the link between nature’s resilience and human resilience,” I said. “How addressing human injustices like poverty and gender oppression makes us better able to create hope for people and the environment. Our efforts to protect endangered species preserve biodiversity on the Earth—and when we protect all life, we inherently protect our own.

In another widely reported study, the Belly Button Biodiversity Project, conducted by researchers at North Carolina State University, sixty random Americans had their belly buttons swabbed to see what was lurking there microbially. The study found 2,368 species of bacteria, 1,458 of which were unknown to science. (That is an average of 24.3 new-to-science microbes in every navel.)

What all this means is that the ecosystems of cities around the world are growing more and more alike; their communities of plants and animals, fungi, single-celled organisms, and viruses are slowly inching toward a single globalized, multi-purpose urban biodiversity. And even if the exact species across cities may not be identical, you will find similar species playing similar roles.

I wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet’s atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.

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.

Instead, good and harmonious life—súmac káusai, alli káusai—should be “the goal or mission of every human effort.” Such a life emerges from ongoing “reciprocity and solidarity” within the human community and between the human community and the biodiversity and spirits of the forest of which people are a part. Western development destroys these relationships, imposing itself by “blood and fire.

What sort of ecology can preserve a robust intellectual biodiversity? We often assume that diversity is a natural upshot of free choice. Yet the market ideal of choice and attendant preoccupation with freedom tends toward a monoculture of human types: the late modern consumer self. At least the market seems to have this effect when we are constantly being addressed with hyperpalatable stimuli.

And we really should be considering the moral implications of what we're doing. What kind of a species are we that we treat the rest of life so cheaply? There are those who think that's the destiny of Earth: We arrived, we're humanizing the Earth, and it will be the destiny of Earth for us to wipe humans out and most of the rest of biodiversity. But I think the great majority of thoughtful people consider that a morally wrong position to take, and a very dangerous one.

The Waorani carry out a similar diet with their arrow poison, called curare or, in their language, oomae. This is another amazing product of the indigenous science, a most sophisticated technology that the Waorani extrapolated from an ancient myth.

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 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.

Planners and designers should encourage as much diversity in human habitats as they find in animal habitats. It is not possible to resolve all conflicts or to gain all ends. Choices have to be made. Different aspects of the public good should be stressed in different places. To achieve variety in land use patterns, there should also be a variety of relationships between the professions, not an institutionalized decision-making tree. Relationships between the constructive professions should, therefore, be deconstructed.

Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river's edge; around them eight hundred species of trees stood, more than are native to all of North America; and a thousand species of butterflies, 6 percent of the entire world fauna, waited for the dawn.About the orchids of that place we knew very little. About flies and beetles almost nothing, fungi nothing, most kinds of organisms nothing. Five thousand kinds of bacteria might be found in a pinch of soil, and about them we knew absolutely nothing. This was wilderness in the sixteenth-century sense, as it must have formed in the minds of the Portuguese explorers, its interior still largely unexplored and filled with strange, myth-engendering plants and animals. From such a place the pious naturalist would send long respectful letters to royal patrons about the wonders of the new world as testament to the glory of God. And I thought: there is still time to see this land in such a manner.

I tried to chart some of the contradictions of human life as I experience it—how we can be so compassionate and so cruel, so persistent and so quick to despair. Above all, I wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet’s atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.

In the collision between the remoteness and purity of the rainforest realms and the crassness of consumer culture, the difference is so extreme that for the most part there has been no authentic or practical method for this medicine system as traditionally practiced to integrate and adapt to the changing times.

The ideology of development has implied the globalization of the priorities, patterns, and prejudices of the West. Instead of self-generated, development is imposed. Instead of coming from within, it is externally guided. Instead of contributing to the maintenance of diversity, development has created homogeneity...

When speaking of the mighty Andes and the so-called "eyebrows" country at the range's eastern base- the Tropical Wet Forest region-I am first obliged to give homage to the Apu, the Mountain Lords, the ice-capped everlasting sovereigns of these great lands, on whose forested slopes manifests the most marvelous biological diversity.

REVIEW: Like a master artisan, Weisberger weaves together threads of anthropology, botany, ecology and psychology in an inspiring tapestry of ideas sure to keep discerning readers warm and hopeful in these cold and desolate times.Unlike other texts, which ordinarily prescribe structural (ie. social, political, economic) solutions to the global crisis of environmental destruction, Rainforest Medicine hones in on the root cause of Western schizophrenia: spiritual poverty, and the resultant alienation of the individual from his environment. This incisive perception is married to a message of hope: that the keys to the door leading to promising new human vistas are held in the humblest of hands; those of the spiritual masters of the Amazon and the traditional cultures from which they hail. By illumining the ancient practices of authentic indigenous Amazonian shamanism, Weisberger supplies us with a manual for conservation of both the rainforest and the soul. And frankly, it could not have arrived at a better time.

Reflecting back on the journey to the “Great Outdoors” places me in a different tonal mood, filled up with hope and passion, not resentful, suppressed relics of anger unresolved Did you listen to the winds? What did you hear? Did you listen to the trees? What knowledge did they bring you? Did you listen to the birds? What songs did they sing to you? Did you listen to the Universe(s)? What messages did they bring you? Did you listen to the ancestors? What hope did they send you? Did you really listen? Close your eyes and open up your full heart and listen again Not for me Do it 4 UrSelf Do it 4 tha Future Look beyond UrSelf Open up UrSelf Love ThySelf Quiet the chatter of your mind, close the racing tracks and be still and quiet so that U can hear what they’re trying to say to U. Be appreciative for what U have been bestowed and blessed to be stewards of, please do not take this to mean: Destroy, dominate, and control. Let it mean be cognizant of the complexity, respect true biodiversity, respect and honor all Life, allow for balance, and recognize evolutionary adaptability in all of Creation. The winds are blowing good tidings and blessings in this here direction as this one poem comes to a close while striving for the rootedness of an ancient Sequoia so high up in the sky and deeply rooted in our common Mother. Listen to my woes of loneliness and see that will Life all around, NO one is truly lonely or alone.

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.

Before my first visit to Waorani territory, I was introduced to don Casimiro Mamallacta, a traditional Kichwa healer and family man living in the outskirts of the jungle town of Archidona, by his daughter Mercedes, whom I met at the Jatun Sacha biological station. During the years that I was collaborating on the demarcation effort and in between the work sessions, I lived with don Casimiro's family.

And sometimes it is possible to rouse them from a seemingly meaningless life with a really good story,' Jane said, 'one that will reach their hearts and wake them up.' 'Can you give me an example?' 'One of my very favorites is fictitious but seems so appropriate now. It is Lord of the Rings.' 'What makes it such an appropriate story for the hopeless?' I asked. 'Because the might the heroes were up against seemed utterly invincible-the might of Mordor, the orcs, and the Black Riders on horses and then on those huge flying beasts. And Samwise and Frodo, two little hobbits, traveling into the heart of danger on their own..... I think it provides us with a blueprint of how we survive and turn around climate change and loos of biodiversity, poverty, racism, discrimination, greed, and corruption. The Dark Lord of Mordor and the Black Riders symbolize all the wickedness we have to fight. The fellowship of the Ring includes all those who are fighting the good fight-we have to work so hard to grow the fellowship around the world.' Jane pointed out that the land of Middle-earth was polluted by the destructive industry of that world in the same way that our environment is devastated today. And she reminded me that Lady Galadriel had given Sam a little box of earth from her orchard. 'Do you remember how he used that gift when he surveyed the devastated landscape after the Dark Lord was finally defeated? He started sprinkling little pinches of the earth all around the country-and everywhere nature sprang back to life. Well, that earth represents all the projects people are doing to restore habitats on planet Earth.

Among the most virulent of all such cultural parasite-equivalents is the religion-based denial of organic evolution. About one-half of Americans (46 percent in 2013, up from 44 percent in 1980), most of whom are evangelical Christians, together with a comparable fraction of Muslims worldwide, believe that no such process has ever occurred. As Creationists, they insist that God created humankind and the rest of life in one to several magical mega-strokes. Their minds are closed to the overwhelming mass of factual demonstrations of evolution, which is increasingly interlocked across every level of biological organization from molecules to ecosystem and the geography of biodiversity. They ignore, or more precisely they call it virtue to remain ignorant of, ongoing evolution observed in the field and even traced to the genes involved. Also looked past are new species created in the laboratory. To Creationists, evolution is at best just an unproven theory. To a few, it is an idea invented by Satan and transmitted through Darwin and later scientists in order to mislead humanity. When I was a small boy attending an evangelical church in Florida, I was taught that the secular agents of Satan are extremely bright and determined, but liars all, man and woman, and so no matter what I heard I must stick my fingers in my ears and hold fast to the true faith. We are all free in a democracy to believe whatever we wish, so why call any opinion such as Creationism a virulent cultural parasite-equivalent? Because it represents a triumph of blind religious faith over carefully tested fact. It is not a conception of reality forged by evidence and logical judgment. Instead, it is part of the price of admission to a religious tribe. Faith is the evidence given of a person’s submission to a particular god, and even then not to the deity directly but to other humans who claim to represent the god. The cost to society as a whole of the bowed head has been enormous. Evolution is a fundamental process of the Universe, not just in living organisms but everywhere, at every level. Its analysis is vital to biology, including medicine, microbiology, and agronomy. Furthermore psychology, anthropology, and even the history of religion itself make no sense without evolution as the key component followed through the passage of time. The explicit denial of evolution presented as a part of a “creation science” is an outright falsehood, the adult equivalent of plugging one’s ears, and a deficit to any society that chooses to acquiesce in this manner to a fundamentalist faith.

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.

Environmentalists believe that monolithic solutions - be they in the auto, nuclear, or genetics field - are doomed to fail and lead only along the path to dependence. They feel rather that it is far more sensible to approach the future by opening up more possibilities. Likewise, polyamorists believe that monogamy sterilizes love and fosters unhealthy codependence, whereas multiple relationships feed off of each other's differences and ultimately lead to an enriching fulfillment.

There are hundreds of examples of highly functioning commons around the world today. Some have been around for centuries, others have risen in response to economic and environmental crises, and still others have been inspired by the distributive bias of digital networks. From the seed-sharing commons of India to the Potato Park of Peru, indigenous populations have been maintaining their lands and managing biodiversity through a highly articulated set of rules about sharing and preservation. From informal rationing of parking spaces in Boston to Richard Stallman’s General Public License (GPL) for software, new commons are serving to reinstate the value of land and labor, as well as the ability of people to manage them better than markets can. In the 1990s, Elinor Ostrom, the American political scientist most responsible for reviving serious thought about commoning, studied what specifically makes a commons successful. She concluded that a commons must have an evolving set of rules about access and usage and that it must have a way of punishing transgressions. It must also respect the particular character of the resource being managed and the people who have worked with that resource the longest. Managing a fixed supply of minerals is different from managing a replenishing supply of timber. Finally, size and place matter. It’s easier for a town to manage its water supply than for the planet to establish water-sharing rules.78 In short, a commons must be bound by people, place, and rules. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, it’s not an anything-goes race to the bottom. It is simply a recognition of boundaries and limits. It’s pooled, multifaceted investment in pursuit of sustainable production. It is also an affront to the limitless expansion sought by pure capital. If anything, the notion of a commons’ becoming “enclosed” by privatization is a misnomer: privatizing a commons breaks the boundaries that protected its land and labor from pure market forces. For instance, the open-source seed-sharing networks of India promote biodiversity and fertilizer-free practices among farmers who can’t afford Western pesticides.79 They have sustained themselves over many generations by developing and adhering to a complex set of rules about how seed species are preserved, as well as how to mix crops on soil to recycle its nutrients over centuries of growing. Today, they are in battle with corporations claiming patents on these heirloom seeds and indigenous plants. So it’s not the seed commons that have been enclosed by the market at all; rather, the many-generations-old boundaries have been penetrated and dissolved by disingenuously argued free-market principles.

The Blue Mind Rx Statement Our wild waters provide vast cognitive, emotional, physical, psychological, social, and spiritual values for people from birth, through adolescence, adulthood, older age, and in death; wild waters provide a useful, widely available, and affordable range of treatments healthcare practitioners can incorporate into treatment plans. The world ocean and all waterways, including lakes, rivers, and wetlands (collectively, blue space), cover over 71% of our planet. Keeping them healthy, clean, accessible, and biodiverse is critical to human health and well-being. In addition to fostering more widely documented ecological, economic, and cultural diversities, our mental well-being, emotional diversity, and resiliency also rely on the global ecological integrity of our waters. Blue space gives us half of our oxygen, provides billions of people with jobs and food, holds the majority of Earth's biodiversity including species and ecosystems, drives climate and weather, regulates temperature, and is the sole source of hydration and hygiene for humanity throughout history. Neuroscientists and psychologists add that the ocean and wild waterways are a wellspring of happiness and relaxation, sociality and romance, peace and freedom, play and creativity, learning and memory, innovation and insight, elation and nostalgia, confidence and solitude, wonder and awe, empathy and compassion, reverence and beauty — and help manage trauma, anxiety, sleep, autism, addiction, fitness, attention/focus, stress, grief, PTSD, build personal resilience, and much more. Chronic stress and anxiety cause or intensify a range of physical and mental afflictions, including depression, ulcers, colitis, heart disease, and more. Being on, in, and near water can be among the most cost-effective ways of reducing stress and anxiety. We encourage healthcare professionals and advocates for the ocean, seas, lakes, and rivers to go deeper and incorporate the latest findings, research, and insights into their treatment plans, communications, reports, mission statements, strategies, grant proposals, media, exhibits, keynotes, and educational programs and to consider the following simple talking points: •Water is the essence of life: The ocean, healthy rivers, lakes, and wetlands are good for our minds and bodies. •Research shows that nature is therapeutic, promotes general health and well-being, and blue space in both urban and rural settings further enhances and broadens cognitive, emotional, psychological, social, physical, and spiritual benefits. •All people should have safe access to salubrious, wild, biodiverse waters for well-being, healing, and therapy. •Aquatic biodiversity has been directly correlated with the therapeutic potency of blue space. Immersive human interactions with healthy aquatic ecosystems can benefit both. •Wild waters can serve as medicine for caregivers, patient families, and all who are part of patients’ circles of support. •Realization of the full range and potential magnitude of ecological, economic, physical, intrinsic, and emotional values of wild places requires us to understand, appreciate, maintain, and improve the integrity and purity of one of our most vital of medicines — water.

Sam’s the man who’s come to chop us up to bits. No wonder I kicked him out. No wonder I changed the locks. If he cannot stop death, what good is he? ‘Open the door. Please. I’m so tired,’ he says. I look at the night that absorbed my life. How am I supposed to know what’s love, what’s fear? ‘If you’re Sam who am I?’ ‘I know who you are.’ ‘You do?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Who?’ Don’t say wife, I think. Don’t say mother. I put my face to the glass, but it’s dark. I don’t reflect. Sam and I watch each other through the window of the kitchen door. He coughs some more. ‘I want to come home,’ he says. ‘I want us to be okay. That’s it. Simple. I want to come home and be a family.’ ‘But I am not simple.’ My body’s coursing with secret genes and hormones and proteins. My body made eyeballs and I have no idea how. There’s nothing simple about eyeballs. My body made food to feed those eyeballs. How? And how can I not know or understand the things that happen inside my body? That seems very dangerous. There’s nothing simple here. I’m ruled by elixirs and compounds. I am a chemistry project conducted by a wild child. I am potentially explosive. Maybe I love Sam because hormones say I need a man to kill the coyotes at night, to bring my babies meat. But I don’t want caveman love. I want love that lives outside the body. I want love that lives. ‘In what ways are you not simple?’ I think of the women I collected upstairs. They’re inside me. And they are only a small fraction of the catalog. I think of molds, of the sea, the biodiversity of plankton. I think of my dad when he was a boy, when he was a tree bud. ‘It’s complicated,’ I say, and then the things I don’t say yet. Words aren’t going to be the best way here. How to explain something that’s coming into existence? ‘I get that now.’ His shoulders tremble some. They jerk. He coughs. I have infected him. ‘Sam.’ We see each other through the glass. We witness each other. That’s something, to be seen by another human, to be seen over all the years. That’s something, too. Love plus time. Love that’s movable, invisible as a liquid or gas, love that finds a way in. Love that leaks. ‘Unlock the door,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to love you because I’m scared.’ ‘So you imagine bad things about me. You imagine me doing things I’ve never done to get rid of me. Kick me out so you won’t have to worry about me leaving?’ ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Right.’ And I’m glad he gets that. Sam cocks his head the same way a coyote might, a coyote who’s been temporarily confused by a question of biology versus mortality. What’s the difference between living and imagining? What’s the difference between love and security? Coyotes are not moral. ‘Unlock the door?’ he asks. This family is an experiment, the biggest I’ve ever been part of, an experiment called: How do you let someone in? ‘Unlock the door,’ he says again. ‘Please.’ I release the lock. I open the door. That’s the best definition of love. Sam comes inside. He turns to shut the door, then stops himself. He stares out into the darkness where he came from. What does he think is out there? What does he know? Or is he scared I’ll kick him out again? That is scary. ‘What if we just left the door open?’ he asks. ‘Open.’ And more, more things I don’ts say about the bodies of women. ‘Yeah.’ ‘What about skunks?’ I mean burglars, gangs, evil. We both peer out into the dark, looking for thees scary things. We watch a long while. The night does nothing. ‘We could let them in if they want in,’ he says, but seems uncertain still. ‘Really?’ He draws the door open wider and we leave it that way, looking out at what we can’t see. Unguarded, unafraid, love and loved. We keep the door open as if there are no doors, no walls, no skin, no houses, no difference between us and all the things we think of as the night.