Habitat Destruction Quotes

We are cynical about our own species, but less so about animals, especially wild ones. We might not shelter them from habitat destruction, but we do tend to shelter them from excessive irony.

Our demise may instead result from the habitat destruction that ensues when the AI begins massive global construction projects using nanotech factories and assemblers—construction

Outright destruction of rebellious ships or habitats - pour encouragez les autres - of course remains an option for the controlling power, but all the usual rules of uprising realpolitik still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind.

It stands to reason that, until very recently, all vertebrate life on the planet was wildlife. But astoundingly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land animals; human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent of the biomass. This Frankenstein biosphere is due both to the explosion of industrial agriculture and to a hollowing out of wildlife itself, which has decreased in abundance by as much as 50 percent since 1970. This cull is from both direct hunting and global-scale habitat destruction: almost half of the earth’s land has been converted to farmland.

Over a decade of citywide rezonings, land speculations, and corporate bidding wars for available commercial space has produced a Darwinian habitat where corporate retail proliferates, and where mom-and-pops have become an endangered species.

With knowledge accumulated from dozens of expeditions and hundreds of dives and countless encounters with sharks of many kinds came the realization that I could never write Jaws today. I could never demonize an animal, especially not an animal that is much older and much more successful in its habitat than man is, has been, or ever will be, an animal that is vitally necessary for the balance of nature in the sea, and an animal that we may—if we don’t change our destructive behaviors—extinguish from the face of the earth.

It seems both outrageous and irresponsible that so few mental health clinicians connect the epidemics of mental distress in industrial societies with the devastating impact of our suicidal destruction of our own habitat and ecocidal elimination of whole species. — Linda Buzzel and Craig Chalquist

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.

A tiny spark in the dry desert wood can grow to a blaze and run wild, burning bright orange and red. It devours the land and exhales thick black smoke that overtakes the sky, dimming the sun for miles, ash falling like snow. Habitats—brush and shrubs and trees—and homes—cabins and mansions and bungalows, ranches and vineyards and farms—go up in smoke and leave behind a scorched earth. But that land is young once again, ready to grow something new. Destruction. And renewal, rising from the ashes. The story of fire. •

The processes through which past societies have undermined themselves by damaging their environments fall into eight categories, whose relative importance differs from case to case: deforestation and habitat destruction, soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses), water management problems, overhunting, overfishing, effects of introduced species on native species, human population growth, and increased per-capita impact of people.

Today an estimated 13 percent of birds are threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. So are 25 percent of mammals and 41 percent of amphibians, in large part because of human activity. Hydropower and road construction imperil China’s giant pandas. The northern bald ibis, once abundant in the Middle East, has been driven almost to extinction by hunting, habitat loss, and the difficulties of doing conservation work in war-torn Syria. Hunting and the destruction of wetlands for agriculture drove the population of North America’s tallest bird, the whooping crane, into the teens before stringent protections along the birds’ migratory route and wintering grounds helped the wild flock build back to a few hundred. Little brown bats are dying off in the United States and Canada from a fungus that might have been imported from Europe by travelers. Of some 300 species of freshwater mussels in North America, fully 70 percent are extinct, imperiled, or vulnerable, thanks to the impacts of water pollution from logging, dams, farm runoff, and shoreline development.

I gave a magic wand to Amanda Rinderle of Tuckerman & Co., maker of probably the world's most sustainable dress shirts. If she could use it, I asked, to change one thing in order to help create an economy of better but less, what would that one thing be?...she would make prices tell the whole truth. Right now, prices reflect demand for goods and services and the costs of producing them: materials, energy, manufacturing, shipping. Mostly excluded are the consequences of production and consumption, from pollution to soil erosion to carbon emissions to habitat loss and onward to the human health effects of all these, the incredible destruction wrought by wildfires, floods and storms in the age of climate chaos, the burden of two billion tonnes of garbage each year, and the incalculable moral injury of driving million-year-old species into extinction.

Today, just about 380,000 acres of wetland23 remain, about 9 percent of the nearly 4 million acres that existed in the 1850s—and that was preserved only after a heroic push for restoration by environmentalists horrified by the destruction of crucial habitat for wild birds along the Pacific Flyway.

Man ( the human ego) is not so much destroying the planet as it is destroying itself. The planet will Be Here regardless of human habitation. But human ego is destructive and therefore destroys it's very habitat. Soon when there is not habitat for human ego; the ego dies. What remains is your Being unfettered by the materialistic illusions of what the ancients referred to as Maya

The greatest threat to all wild animals is the loss of habitat—the destruction of the areas and resources they need to survive. Climate change is exacerbating the pressures, forcing some species to move to higher elevations or toward the edges of their ranges. There aren’t any easy or ready solutions, and I’m not pretending to offer any here. But as we wrestle with these matters, we would do well to remember that the animals our decisions affect are, like us, beings who have minds.

Laisvė recited her understanding of the word history, in triplets: “Explosion, cosmos, chaos. Water, land, cells. Plants, fish, animals. Indigenous humans, habitats, stories. Dreams, desire, death. Invasion, dispossession, colonization. Money, ships, slavery. God, goods and services, slaughter. War, power, genocide. Civilization, progress, destruction. Science, transportation, cities. Skyscrapers, bridges, poison. “Nations, power, brutality. Terror, insurrection, incarceration. Collapse, raids, water.

Observations show that primates in the wild show little aggression, while primates in the zoo can show an excessive amount of destructiveness. This distinction is of fundamental importance for the understanding of human aggression because man thus far in his history has hardly ever lived in his "natural habitat,", with the exception of the hunters and food gatherers and the first agriculturalists down to the fifth millenium B.C. "Civilized" man has always lived in the "Zoo" - i.e. in various degrees of captivity and unfreedom - and this is still true, even in the most advanced societies.

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.

Permanent Revolution THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.1 Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the resources available to humankind are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. That’s why doomsday prophesies of resource scarcity are probably misplaced. In contrast, the fear of ecological degradation is only too well founded. The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction. In fact, ecological turmoil might endanger the survival of Homo sapiens itself. Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters. As humans use their power to counter the forces of nature and subjugate the ecosystem to their needs and whims, they might cause more and more unanticipated and dangerous side effects. These are likely to be controllable only by even more drastic manipulations of the ecosystem, which would result in even worse chaos. Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid. Still, the rumours of our own extinction are premature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens.

understand that the greatest danger to wildlife was not poaching but habitat destruction—the same thing that ultimately threatened humans.

If there is anything our culture desperately needs to learn about the morality of food production, it is that carrots can be grown using methods devastatingly destructive and deeply immoral--monoculture, herbicides, insecticides, destruction of habitat by plowing to the ditch banks, fill in the blanks--and beefsteaks can be produced in a way that protects and nurtures the soil and the total fabric of life, a pretty moral thing to do, in my mind.

The agent causing the most immediate damage to species in fresh water are dams, great boosters of local economies but unfortunately chief demons of aquatic habitat destruction. Their

So why is this bird so rare?” asked Bastian. “Oh, the usual story,” said Carol. “Invasion and destruction of its habitats. Hunting. Egg theft. The last breeding pair in Cornwall were shot by a local man who thought they were Nazi spies.

Instead of modifying their beliefs, institutions, politics, and property systems to fit their environment, humans enter habitats and alter them to suit their cultures.

Preface to the Paperback Edition The coronavirus, a severe acute respiratory syndrome, has unleashed a pandemic since the original publication of Epidemics and Society. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is still too new and too poorly understood to allow us to assess its ultimate impact, but its broad contours have become sufficiently clear, and several of its features relate closely to the themes of this book. Like all pandemics, COVID-19 is not an accidental or random event. Epidemics afflict societies through the specific vulnerabilities people have created by their relationships with the environment, other species, and each other. Microbes that ignite pandemics are those whose evolution has adapted them to fill the ecological niches that we have prepared. COVID-19 flared up and spread because it is suited to the society we have made. A world with nearly eight billion people, the majority of whom live in densely crowded cities and all linked by rapid air travel, creates innumerable opportunities for pulmonary viruses. At the same time, demographic increase and frenetic urbanization lead to the invasion and destruction of animal habitat, altering the relationship of humans to the animal world. Particularly relevant is the multiplication of contacts with bats, which are a natural reservoir of innumerable viruses capable of crossing the species barrier and spilling over to humans.

Much nature writing has emphasized the beauty, integrity, and necessity of wilderness. But the notions of wild and wilderness often have been accompanied by dichotomies: wilderness versus civilization, wild versus domesticated, pristine wilderness versus active human presence. While Western culture has traditionally given positive value to the second set of terms, there is a growing tendency to hold that wilderness has primary worth…but still this belief is often based on the old assumptions: that nature and humans are distinct, and that nature is healthy only when it is free of human interference. To think instead about being in place is to assume that there is at least the possibly of living with the land and its processes. How can we live in place, truly inhabit the earth, and become native to our lands? So we are engaged in an ongoing struggle, a search for a new relation to the earth. It is also an old relationship: to be in and of place, to truly inhabit the land rather than just live on it. Why is it important? The answer is all around us in the destruction of habitats, species, and individual beings…the answer also lies inside us, in a psychological rupture from the physical matrix of our life-nature, and our bodies. And the answer is in the way we treat each other: our debasement and abuse of nature is linked with our debasement and abuse of people. To heal the social and the psychological, we need to heal our relationship with the earth.

As long as people and institutions are allowed to profit from land at the expense of other people, we're enabling a system that incentivizes the destruction of our own habitat. This happens in three ways: First, since human beings are allowed to profit not only from their goods and services but also from nature, we encourage the pillaging of nature. Second, because our ability to profit from land at the expense of our communities is firmly entrenched in our economic system, and as a result existing land is priced far above its actual value, the cost of living is significantly higher than it should be. This forces human beings to extend themselves and their economic activities far beyond levels actually necessary to support their ongoing existence. Third, our current model of land ownership encourages a sprawl of human civilization as populations seek out land that's still available at a lesser cost. In the areas where rainforest destruction is epidemic, wealth inequality and land ownership rates are particularly disproportionate; millions of acres of prime farmland are owned by a few, while the many are forced to slash and burn large areas of rainforest just to make a living by other means.

Birds have nests Even the ants too Cows live in a pen Even the hogs do Dogs have their kennels And the roaming fowls, their roost The spider weaves a knot of webs and calls it home Flocks migrate seasonally So they may have a place to call home You see, the home is the nucleus of a society And is a right A God given innate right That need not be taught Fowls, beasts, insects, hedgehogs Rabbits and bears were not schooled Yet, they know the foundation Of building a society, a home People were battered, conquered Their habitats destroyed, stolen and possessed The loot fattened conquerors laughed and were merry “Ha, Ha, Ha, what a loot,” they toot Has this habit been buried and goodbyes read? Or is it camouflaged under a piece of linen? Crowing hellos every morning This habit is rampant and purposefully legalized Operating under a camouflaged linen Conquerors, shouting hypocritical hellos daily Destroying the nucleus of society, the home Bank of America is one such culprit operating Under such names as Specialized Loan Services Taking people’s homes, relegating them To less than dogs and insects How dare this facetious beast Continue its rampage of destruction? Having their helpless cronies do their dirty work? Whilst they appear as shining glory? How dare you? Hasten to make right your wrongs! Or May you find peace in Hell’s bosom May your deficit grow higher than Mount Everest May you be taken over by a conglomerate May your gains be eroded like sand pebbles May you never break even or see a profit May all your spoils be dragged from under your feet

If we are bound and determined to speak in terms of reference, nuclear war is the only possible referent of any discourse and any experience that would share their condition with that of literature. If, according to a structuring hypothesis, a fantasy or phantasm, nuclear war is equivalent to the total destruction of the archive, if not of the human habitat, it becomes the absolute referent, the horizon and the condition of all the others.

If we are bound and determined to speak in terms of reference, nuclear war is the only possible referent of any discourse and any experience that would share their condition with that of literature. If, according to a structuring hypothesis, a fantasy or phantasm, nuclear war is equivalent to the total destruction of the archive, if not of the human habitat, it becomes the absolute referent, the horizon and the condition of all the others...This absolute referent of all possible literature is on par with the absolute effacement of any possible trace; it is thus the only ineffaceable trace, it is so as the trace of what is entirely other, "trace du tout autre." This is the only absolute trace - effaceable, ineffaceable. The only "subject" of all possible literature, of all possible criticism, its only ultimate and a-symbolic referent, unsymbolizable, even unsignifiable; this is, if not the nuclear age, if not the nuclear catastrophe, at least that toward which nuclear discourse and the nuclear symbolic are still beckoning: the remainderless and a-symbolic destruction of literature. Literature and literary criticism cannot speak of anything else, they can have no other ultimate referent, they can only multiply their strategic maneuvers in order to assimilate that unassimilable wholly other. They are nothing but those maneuvers and that diplomatic strategy, with the "double talk" that can never be reduced to them. For simultaneously, that "subject" cannot be a nameable "subject," nor that "referent" a nameable referent. Then the perspective of nuclear war allows us to re-elaborate the question of the referent. What is a referent? In another way, to elaborate the question of the transcendental ego, the transcendental subject, Husserl's phenomenology needed, at some point, the fiction of total chaos. Capable of speaking only of that, literature cannot help but speak of other things as well, and invent strategies for speaking of other things, for putting off the encounter with the wholly other, an encounter with which, however, this relationless relation, this relation of incommensurability cannot be wholly suspended, even though it is precisely its epochal suspension. This is the only invention possible.

Strikingly, Crescent Dunes has been fought by Prophets. As a rule, renewable-energy leaders see their goal as building giant, centralized facilities like Crescent Dunes—they are Borlaugians through and through, hard-path advocates in solar guise. But many or most renewable-energy supporters are Prophets who view Big Solar and Big Wind with almost as much distaste as the Big Coal and Big Oil they seek to replace. From its inception, Crescent Dunes was resisted by an environmental organization, Basin and Range, because the installation, like Father Himalaya’s Pyrheliophoro, kills any birds that come near it. Basin and Range also objected to the concomitant destruction of the fragile desert environment; building Crescent Dunes required bulldozing about 2.5 square miles of arid land, including about 10 percent of the habitat of two rare beetles, the Crescent Dunes aegialian scarab and the Crescent Dunes serican scarab.

Prophets smite their brows in exasperation at this logic. To their minds, evaluating farming systems wholly in terms of calories produced—in terms of usable energy—is a perfect example of the flaws of reductive thinking. It does not include the costs of overfertilization, habitat loss, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction, and pesticide and antibiotic overuse; it doesn’t account for the destruction of rural communities; it doesn’t consider whether the food is tasty and nutritious. It’s like evaluating automobiles entirely by their gasoline mileage, without taking into account safety, comfort, reliability, emissions, or any of the other factors that people consider when buying cars.

In Brazil, the rainforests of the Amazon are being destroyed at an alarming rate by bulldozing and burning. There are many excellent reasons to prevent this continuing – loss of habitat for organisms, production of carbon dioxide from burning trees, destruction of the culture of native Indian tribes, and so on. What is not a good reason, though, is the phrase that is almost inevitably trotted out, to the effect that the rainforests are the ‘lungs of the planet’. The image here is that the ‘civilized’ regions – that is, the industrialized ones – are net producers of carbon dioxide. The pristine rainforest, in contrast, produces a gentle but enormous oxygen breeze, while absorbing the excess carbon dioxide produced by all those nasty people with cars. It must do, surely? A forest is full of plants, and plants produce oxygen. No, they don’t. The net oxygen production of a rainforest is, on average, zero. Trees produce carbon dioxide at night, when they are not photosynthesizing. They lock up oxygen and carbon into sugars, yes – but when they die, they rot, and release carbon dioxide. Forests can indirectly remove carbon dioxide by removing carbon and locking it up as coal or peat, and by releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. Ironically, that’s where a lot of the human production of carbon dioxide comes from – we dig it up and burn it again, using up the same amount of oxygen. If the theory that oil is the remains of plants from the carboniferous period is true, then our cars are burning up carbon that was once laid down by plants. Even if an alternative theory, growing in popularity, is true, and oil was produced by bacteria, then the problem remains the same. Either way, if you burn a rainforest you add a one-off surplus of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, but you do not also reduce the Earth’s capacity to generate new oxygen. If you want to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide permanently, and not just cut short-term emissions, the best bet is to build up a big library at home, locking carbon into paper, or put plenty of asphalt on roads. These don’t sound like ‘green’ activities, but they are. You can cycle on the roads if it makes you feel better.

if I started listing the creatures destroyed by habitat destruction we would be here all day.

Evolution is the sadistic headmaster of the Succeed-or-Die School of Invention, motto: Disce aut consumere!—“learn or get eaten!” It is sad and sometimes ugly when a species fails in this school, especially ugly if the change they are confronted with is caused by human thoughtlessness. Sometimes the two happen in tandem and ugliness can create unexpected beauty. New railway lines are notorious for the havoc and destruction they can bring to a landscape, impacting both natural and artificial environments. However, the need to keep general human traffic away from the iron dragons that pass along these new lines has created a new habitat and led to a renaissance in rare wildflowers in some areas. But perhaps the most surreal and ironic example of this is the fact that many naturalists now support the military’s habit of firing big explosive shells at landscapes. Exploding ordnance falling from the sky has the dependable effect of keeping humans away and, consequently, firing ranges have accidentally created some of the most healthy ecosystems in Britain. Naturalists and the military are now working more closely, and this unlikely partnership is becoming less accidental and more deliberate.

For thousands of years we have struggled with the human condition under the assumption that this condition, whatever its faults, would continue. Now and forever, the creed of my childhood faith reads, now and forever. But now, for the first time in human history, we are living at a juncture where the twin realities of climate crisis and habitat destruction are so far-reaching that the basic web of biological connections required to support life on earth are swiftly breaking down. People are rightfully experiencing unprecedented anxiety and despair as we contemplate our place on this planet, and what is asked of us.

Humanity must work together to stop deforestation. Every minute over 160 acres of land feel the destructive effects of deforestation. Deforestation causes species to become extinct, disrupts natural habitats, and erodes the top soil of viable farming lands causing drought and famine.

We clear-cut forests and destroy entire habitats to produce paper when superior, cheaper, and far less destructive bamboo alternatives are available.