Habitat Fragmentation Quotes

Nature, too, supports our personal blossoming (if we have any quiet exposure to her) through her spontaneities, through her beauty, power, and mirroring, through her dazzling variety of species and habitats, and by way of the wind, Moon, Sun, stars, and galaxies.

Among all the factors that contribute to habitat fragmentation--which is the leading threat to biodiversity in the West--roads are at the top of the list.

For decades physicists have wondered why the four forces of nature appear to be so fragmented-why the "cheetah" looks so pitiful and broken in his cage. The fundamental reason why these four forces seem so dissimilar, notes Freund, is that we have been observing the "caged cheetah." Our three-dimensional laboratories are sterile zoo cages for the laws of physics. But when we formulate the laws in higher-dimensional space-time, their natural habitat, we see their true brilliance and power; the laws become simple and powerful. The revolution now sweeping over physics is the realization that the natural home for the cheetah may be hyperspace.

Perhaps they had tried to migrate in the past but had found either their winter habitat destroyed or the path so fragmented and fraught with danger that it made more sense—to these few birds—to ignore the tuggings of the stars and seasons and instead to try to carve out new lives, new ways of being, even in such a stark and severe landscape: or rather, in a stark and severe period—knowing that lushness and bounty were still retained with that landscape, that it was only a phase, that better days would come. That in fact (the snipe knowing these things with their blood, ten million years in the world) the austere times were the very thing, the very imbalance, that would summon the resurrection of that frozen richness within the soil—if indeed that richness, that magic, that hope, did still exist beneath the ice and snow. Spring would come like its own green fire, if only the injured ones could hold on. And

Restoring habitat where we live and work, and to a lesser extent where we farm and graze, will go a long way toward building biological corridors that connect preserved habitat fragments with one another.