Species Conservation Quotes

...An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand...

The oceans are the planet's last great living wilderness, man's only remaining frontier on Earth, and perhaps his last chance to prove himself a rational species.

Our inability to think beyond our own species, or to be able to co-habit with other life forms in what is patently a massive collaborative quest for survival, is surely a malady that pervades the human soul.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

I have spent hours and hours watching elephants, and to come to understand what emotional creatures they are...it's not just a species facing extinction, it's massive individual suffering.

Man's rights are linked with man's duties, and when they are distorted into extravagant claims for a species of freedom and equality and worldly aggrandizement which human character cannot sustain, they degenerate from rights to vices.

Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.

In every remote corner of the world there are people like Carl Jones and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving threatened species. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an endangered species and extinction. But why do they bother? Does it really matter if the Yangtze river dolphin, or the kakapo, or the northern white rhino, or any other species live on only in scientists' notebooks? Well, yes, it does. Every animal and plant is an integral part of its environment: even Komodo dragons have a major role to play in maintaining the ecological stability of their delicate island homes. If they disappear, so could many other species. And conservation is very much in tune with our survival. Animals and plants provide us with life-saving drugs and food, they pollinate crops and provide important ingredients or many industrial processes. Ironically, it is often not the big and beautiful creatures, but the ugly and less dramatic ones, that we need most. Even so, the loss of a few species may seem irrelevant compared to major environmental problems such as global warming or the destruction of the ozone layer. But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving. There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.

Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows." Essay on the Biological Sciences, in: Good Reading (1958)

Only the most arrogant, shortsighted, and spiritually bereft of our species would say that, at any cost to other species, we need only worry about our own.

Spraying to kill trees and and raspberry bushes after a clear-cut merely looks unaesthetic for a short time, but tree plantations are deliberate ecodeath. Yet, tree planting is often pictorially advertised on television and in national magazines by focusing on cupped caring hands around a seedling. But forests do not need this godlike interference... Planting tree plantations is permanent deforestation... The extensive planting of just one exotic species removes thousands of native species.

But rewilding, unlike conservation, has no fixed objective: it is driven not by human management but by natural processes. There is no point at which it can be said to have arrived. Rewilding of the kind that interests me does not seek to control the natural world, to re-create a particular ecosystem or landscape, but – having brought back some of the missing species – to allow it to find its own way.

Global transformation can occur only when each individual has the courage to awaken from this amnesia to our true self and then make conscious choices true to our spirit. The human race is the only species on earth evolved enough to be capable of this privilege.

All zoos, even the most enlightened, are built upon the idea both beguiling and repellent—the notion that we can seek out the wildness of the world and behold its beauty, but that we must first contain that wildness. Zoos argue that they are fighting for the conservation of the Earth, that they educate the public and provide refuge and support for vanishing species. And they are right. Animal-rights groups argue that zoos traffic in living creatures, exploiting them for financial gain and amusement. And they are right. Caught inside this contradiction are the animals themselves, and the humans charged with their well-being.

If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking.

Extinction, the irrevocable loss of a species, causes pain that can never find relief. It is an ache that will pass from generation to generation for the rest of human history.

Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning that library without ever having read its books.

All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and his propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages.

Why the conservatives, who controlled all three branches of the federal government, were still so enraged--at respectful skeptics of the Iraq War, at gay couples who wanted to get married, at bland Al Gore and cautious Hillary Clinton, at endangered species and their advocates, at taxes and gas prices that were among the lowest of any industrialized nation, at a mainstream media whose corporate owners were themselves conservatives, at the Mexicans who cut their grass and washed their dishes--was somewhat mysterious to Walter.

species have the potential to sink or save the ecosystem, depending on the circumstances. Knowing that we must preserve ecosystems with as many of their interacting species as possible defines our challenge in no uncertain terms. It helps us to focus on the ecosystem as an integrated functioning unit, and it deemphasizes the conservation of single species. Surely this more comprehensive approach is the way to go.

If we assume, very conservatively, that there are two million species in the tropical rainforests, this means that something like five thousand species are being lost each year. This comes to roughly fourteen species a day, or one every hundred minutes.

Even if mankind can go on without them, a piece of our vibrantly diverse world dies along with each species.

Climate protection, conservation and environmental protection is species protection.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

in the United States, right-wing conservatives tend to care far less about things such as pollution and endangered species than left-wing progressives, which is why Louisiana has much weaker environmental regulations than Massachusetts.

Christians who like to write might do as a description of the genus. But the actual species shared more precise characteristics, including intellectual vivacity, love of death, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle.

It is evident that the chief feeling induced by woody country is one of reverence for its antiquity. There is a quiet melancholy about the decay of the patriarchal trunks, which is enhanced by the green and elastic vigor of the young saplings; the noble form of the forest aisles, and the subdued light which penetrates their entangled boughs, combine to add to the impression; and the whole character of the scene is calculated to excite conservative feeling. The man who could remain a radical in a wood country is a disgrace to his species.

We trust ourselves, far more than our ancestors did… The root of our predicament lies in the simple fact that, though we remain a flawed and unstable species, plagued now as in the past by a thousand weaknesses, we have insisted on both unlimited freedom and unlimited power. It would now seem clear that, if we want to stop the devastation of the earth, the growing threats to our food, water, air, and fellow creatures, we must find some way to limit both.

Wildlife conservation is always a race against time. As zoologists and botanists explore new areas, scrabbling to record the mere existence of species before they become extinct, it’s like someone hurrying through a burning library desperately trying to jot down some of the tittles of books that will now never be read.

New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private, for-profit health care "soulless vampire bastards making money off human pain." Now, I know what you're thinking: "But, Bill, the profit motive is what sustains capitalism." Yes, and our sex drive is what sustains the human species, but we don't try to fuck everything. It wasn't that long ago when a kid in America broke his leg, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun stuck a thermometer in his ass, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle, and you were done. The bill was $1.50; plus, you got to keep the thermometer. But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some bean counter decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. The more people who get sick, and stay sick, the higher their profit margins, which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O. Did you know that the United States is ranked fiftieth in the world in life expectancy? And the forty-nine loser countries were they live longer than us? Oh, it's hardly worth it, they may live longer, but they live shackled to the tyranny of nonprofit health care. Here in America, you're not coughing up blood, little Bobby, you're coughing up freedom. The problem with President Obama's health-care plan isn't socialism. It's capitalism. When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross Blue Shield. And it's not just medicine--prisons also used to be a nonprofit business, and for good reason--who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition, you're going to have trouble with the tenants. It's not a coincidence that we outsourced running prisons to private corporations and then the number of prisoners in America skyrocketed. There used to be some things we just didn't do for money. Did you know, for example, there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? FDR said he didn't want World War II to create one millionaire, but I'm guessing Iraq has made more than a few executives at Halliburton into millionaires. Halliburton sold soldiers soda for $7.50 a can. They were honoring 9/11 by charging like 7-Eleven. Which is wrong. We're Americans; we don't fight wars for money. We fight them for oil. And my final example of the profit motive screwing something up that used to be good when it was nonprofit: TV news. I heard all the news anchors this week talk about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. And I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it.

Life has had to deal with environmental change, especially climate change, since the beginning of its existence on Earth. Species adjust or go extinct, and both have happened. For life-forms with our kinds of cells—eukaryotic, the kind with distinct organelles—the average existence of a species is about 1 million years, and, on average, one species goes extinct a year, at least of the species we have named and know, including those we know only from fossil records." -Dan Botkin, excerpt from THE MOON IN THE NAUTILUS SHELL.

The work to protect one species benefits us all.

Any species that devours its natural environment will eventually fall victim to the resulting silence and I call the toxicity of silence: Extinction Silence

Every organism on Earth is here not for us but with us, and the loss of a single species by our hands is an eradication of our own being.

Humans are the loneliest of creatures earth amongst all the earth's species, self-consciously and visibly a species apart.

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.

The history of the world will, one day, be defined by the people who witnessed the tragedy of impending extinction and were able to turn humanity's destructive patterns into creative solutions.

Or, il est tout au moins possible que, dans des milieux différents, de légères modifications de l'instinct puissent être avantageuses à une espèce. Il en résulte que, si on peut démontrer que les instincts varient si peu que ce soit, il n'y a aucune difficulté à admettre que la sélection naturelle puisse conserver et accumuler constamment les variations de l'instinct, aussi longtemps qu'elles sont profitables aux individus.

Surely the first obligation of a political thinker is to understand the nature of man. The Conservative does not claim special powers of perception on this point, but he does claim a familiarity with the accumulated wisdom and experience of history, and he is not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past. The first thing he has learned about man is that each member of the species is a unique creature. Man’s most sacred possession is his individual soul—which has an immortal side, but also a mortal one. The mortal side establishes his absolute differentness from every other human being. Only a philosophy that takes into account the essential differences between men, and, accordingly, makes provision for developing the different potentialities of each man can claim to be in accord with Nature. We have heard much in our time about “the common man.” It is a concept that pays little attention to the history of a nation that grew great through the initiative and ambition of uncommon men. The Conservative knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.

For all his liberality and his determined attempts at worldliness, he was at heart profoundly conservative and would not keep the works of Darwin or Lyell in his study for fear they carried a contagion that might spread throughout his healthier books. He was not an especially devout man, but felt that a common faith overlooked by a benevolent God was what kept the fabric of society from tearing like a worn sheet. The idea that after all there was no essential nobility in mankind, and that his own species was not a chosen people touched by the divine, troubled him in the hours before dawn; and as with most troubling matters he elected to ignore it, until it went away.

I’m lying on the ground looking up at the branches of an oak tree. Dappled light is shining through the canopy, the leaves whisper ancient incantations. This tree, in its living stage, rooted in sights and sounds that I’ll never know, has witnessed extinctions and wars, loves and losses. I wish we could translate the language of trees – hear their voices, know their stories. They host such an astonishing amount of life – there are thousands of species harbouring in and on and under this mighty giant. And I believe trees are like us, or they inspire the better parts of human nature. If only we could be connected in the way this oak tree is connected with its ecosystem.

Everything is connected,' Sanjay said. 'Protecting the tiger will protect every species of animal and plant that shares its habitat. The trees that scrub pollution from the air and the rivers that supply water to every living thing.

Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrially raised chickens poisons the Chesapeake; the Amazon has been slashed and burned for soy--and don't even mention seafood. To this bunch of herpetologists, the sin of ordering shrimp lay in the bycatch--young fish, and especially sea turtles, caught in the nets and discarded, dead or dying.

FOR ADVANCED EVOLUTIONARY GROWTH PASSION MUST BE CONQUERED AND THE GENERATIVE ORGANS BE USED FOR GENERATION ONLY. In other words: all the sex force not actually used for the perpetuation of the species must by transmutation be made available for higher evolutionary attainment.

This litany of loss […] is the profile of a species going extinct. In a generation or two the memory of wild Africa will be lost as utterly as an American prairie of head high wild flowers swirled by bison, darkened by wild pigeons, bordered by towering forests of chestnuts, as it all was mere moments ago.

We are a rugged species, up for anything the universe can throw at us; and as the great gloominaries knew, we will be immeasurably better prepared for nasty surprises if we approach the universe realistically — pessimistically — than if we continue to peer out at our surroundings through a distorting, rose-colored prism of wish-fulfillment fantasy.

If you wish to bludgeon badgers or beavers or remove peregrine falcons and hen harrier chicks from their nests, a way can be found. If you wish, on the other hand, to restore fading species for nature conservation purposes, then you have to fill in 90-page documents which will be thoroughly scrutinized eventually and returned to you with a further suite of impossibly complex questions.

There's an inevitable entropy in people - a wildness inside us - that tugs at the threadwork of everything we do. Even a job that looks so idealistic and decent can get pocked with misunderstandings, egos, and competition. But that's what every human enterprise is like. That's what every ecosystem is like. To call it unfair is a cop-out. It's the natural order that our species fights to transcend.

The ultimate and most profound reason for the German decline is the fact that the racial problem was ignored, and that its importance in the historical development of nations wasn't grasped. Events that take place in the life of nations are not due to chance, but are the natural results of the effort to conserve and multiply the species and the race--even if people aren't conscious of the inner motives of their conduct.

Though why is it, she wonders casually as she stacks the boxes in her van, that we expect our children to be the ones to halt deforestation and species extinction and to rescue our planet tomorrow, when we are the ones overseeing its destruction today. There’s a Chinese proverb Willow has always loved: The best time to plant a tree is always twenty years ago. And the second-best time is always now. And the same goes for saving the ecosystem.

Dayananda’s contemporary, Pope Pius IX, had much more conservative views about women, but shared Dayananda’s admiration for superhuman authority. Pius led a series of reforms in Catholic dogma and established the novel principle of papal infallibility, according to which the Pope can never err in matters of faith (this seemingly medieval idea became binding Catholic dogma only in 1870, eleven years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species).

Artemis was a goddess of the hunt, and also of the wild animals that she hunted.  She demonstrated the principles of conservation by being the protectress of young animals, ensuring the propagation of the species.  References were frequently made to Artemis in regard to this role.  Hence she is Artemis sovereign of all creatures,[ccxx] and Artemis Agrotera [of the wilderness], Potnia Theron [Lady of wild beasts].[ccxxi] In his manual for hunters, Xenophon describes the prayer the hunter spoke as he released the hunting hounds, "To thee thy share of this chase, Lord Apollo; and thine to thee, O Huntress Queen!"[ccxxii] As well as protecting young animals Artemis also protected their mothers, and hunting female animals could have fatal consequences.  On one occasion a hunter called Saron of Troizenos was chasing a doe when it swam into the sea.  He drowned and his body washed up at the grove of Artemis at the Phoibaian lagoon.

Over a century ago, scientists first began to argue that the patent system and scientific data should be opened up. Back then, it was popular for conservatives to claim that putting geneng into the hands of the public would result in mega-viruses or total species collapse. Open data would be the gateway to a runaway synthetic biology apocalypse. But now we know there has been no one great disaster—only the slow-motion disaster of capitalism converting every living thing and idea into property.

We are not just protecting nature somewhere out there or giving things up simply to prevent the extinction of apparently unimportant beetles or species of birds. On the contrary, with every step we take to help conserve the ecosystem that is the Earth, we are at the same time protecting ourselves and our quality of life, simply because we are a fully functioning part of the whole. Environmental conservation is and must be—literally and in the best sense of the word—about just one thing: self-care.

crisis. Attempts were made to organize a captive breeding population, but the natural objections of the population in question to being so manipulated—combined with our own innate reflexive obedience— foiled all such programs. We are conditioned to adore and obey our Creators on a personal basis, and while it is easy enough to understand the abstract need to preserve their kind as a whole, the conflict between their specific desires and the needs of the species imposed an impossible burden upon their would-be conservators. We

It seems a shame that less than 1 percent of all the species that ever lived survive today and that only about 5 percent of the sum of the world's living species have names. Yet, our preservation efforts must be built on a solid foundation: an ordered taxonomy of living species. So we are forced to do as politicians do--compromise and move forward--often before all the required data are at hand. Every good scientist I know finds such an exercise counterintuitive, difficult, and sometimes impossible. But the really good ones try anyway.

Chronicling the passage of whales has led me to an understanding that we, as a species, now sand at a crossroads. We can face the possibility of our own extinction and work to avert it, or we can flow the more traditional path of earths organisms and fall blindly over the edge. If there's one trait that characterised human beings, it's the will to survive. This, I believe, will motivate us to work with the natural world rather than opposite it, which is all we need to do to give the children of earth - of all species - the opportunity to thrive.

If humanity continues its suicidal ways to change the global climate, eliminate ecosystems, and exhaust Earth's natural resources, our species will very soon find itself forced into making a choice, this time engaging the conscious part of our brain. It is as follows: shall we be existential conservatives, keeping our genetically-based human nature while tapering off the activities inimical to ourselves and the rest of the biosphere? Or shall we use our new technology to accomodate the changes important solely to our own species, while letting the rest of life slip away? We have only a short time to decide.

The organic and inorganic structures supporting human life are changing. Breathtaking technological developments, coupled with rapid advances in medicine, supported a dramatic explosion in the human population worldwide. Increases in human population placed pressure upon the habitat. Lack of foresight and commercial ogres fused to a consumptive consumer mentality fostered a radical reduction in habitat for other creatures and spawned a predictable environmental crisis. Commercial enterprises nimbly renamed the “environmental crisis” the “energy crisis,” effectively downplaying the dramatic cost inflicted upon the ecosystem in the name of preserving cheap energy sources for Americans. We live on the brink of impending disaster. Nonetheless, we must carry on. It is humankind’s greatest challenge to place our self-gratification in check in order to ensure that our species and other creatures survive the violent onslaught raging against the ecosystem. Despite the rapid expansion of new technology, which alters how human beings live and communicate with each other, the fundamental challenge of humanity remains consistent. Every generation must address how to live a purposeful life, one filled with joy and contentment.

All the Navel therefore and conjunctive part we can suppose in Adam, was his dependency on his Maker, and the connexion he must needs have unto heaven, who was the Sonne of God. For holding no dependence on any preceding efficient but God; in the act of his production there may be conceived some connexion, and Adam to have been in a moment all Navel with his Maker. And although from his carnality and corporal existence, the conjunction seemeth no nearer than of causality and effect; yet in his immortall and diviner part he seemed to hold a nearer coherence, and an umbilicality even with God himself. And so indeed although the propriety of this part be found but in some animals, and many species there are which have no Navell at all; yet is there one link and common connexion, one general ligament, and necessary obligation of all whatever unto God. Whereby although they act themselves at distance, and seem to be at loose; yet doe they hold a continuity with their Maker. Which catenation or conserving union when ever his pleasure shall divide, let goe, or separate, they shall fall from their existence, essence, and operations; in brief, they must retire unto their primitive nothing, and shrink into that Chaos again.

In a remarkable book called Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, the historian Modris Eksteins anatomizes the metabolism of the sentimentality that underwrites Keynes’s embrace of guilt as an instrument of policy. Eksteins shows how sentimentality and a species of extravagant mythmaking mark the points of contact between avant-garde culture and burgeoning totalitarianism. This was especially true in Germany, the country that had advanced the radical program of the avant-garde most enthusiastically. England, by contrast, was a conservative power. Where Germany started the war to transform the world, England fought the war to preserve a world and the culture that defined it. A key difference lies in the aestheticization of life: treating life, that is to say, as if it were a work of art devoid of human reality. On the continent, as the historian Carl Schorske put it in his classic study offin-de-siècle Vienna, “the usual moralistic culture of the European bourgeoisie was . . . both overlaid and undermined by an amoral Gef ühlskultur [sentimental culture].” This revolution in sensibility amounted to a crisis of morality—what the novelist Hermann Broch called a “value vacuum”—that quickly precipitated a crisis in liberal cultural and political life. “Narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling were the consequence,” Schorske wrote.

What is important in conserving an ecosystem is conserving the functions, the connections between organisms that form a complete, interacting whole. In reality, species do move, and the notion of ‘native’ species is inevitably arbitrary, often tied into national identity. In Britain, ‘native’ plants and animals are categorized as those that have inhabited Britain since the last ice age. In the United States, however, ‘native’ plants and animals are those that have existed there only since before Columbus landed in the Caribbean. These plants and animals have legal protection over and above ‘aliens’, but there is no easy distinction between native and non-native ranges for species, and non-native plants are not necessarily damaging to native diversity

That impulse, which rules equally in the noblest and the ignoblest, the impulse to the conservation of the species, breaks forth from time to time as reason and passion of spirit; it has then a brilliant train of motives about it, and tries with all its power to make us forget that fundamentally it is just impulse, instinct, folly and baselessness. Life should be loved, for . . .! Man should benefit himself and his neighbour, for . . .! And whatever all these shoulds and fors imply, and may imply in future! In order that that which necessarily and always happens of itself and without design, may henceforth appear to be done by design, and may appeal to men as reason and ultimate command, for that purpose the ethi-culturist comes forward as the teacher of design in existence;

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, 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. And so we’ve created another class of animals. These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back. The term of art for such creatures is “conservation-reliant,” though they might also be called “Stockholm species” for their utter dependence on their persecutors.

As individuals and as species, living organisms are part of interdependent communities, existing within a web of mutualisms that Leopold once imagined as “a universal symbiosis.” Given the harm our species is capable of doing to others, it’s understandable that over the course of the conservation movement, some have tried to sever our relationships with other species, drawing hard boundaries in an attempt to limit our exploitation of other forms of life. Boundaries have been useful to conservation—and will continue to be. But the lesson of ecology, much like that of Aesop’s fables, is that human relationships with the rest of life are both inescapable and inescapably complex. The great challenge of conservation is to sustain complexity, in its many forms, and by doing so protect the possibility of a future for all life on earth. And for that, there are no panaceas.

Nature herself in times of great poverty or bad climatic conditions, as well as poor harvest, intervenes to restrict the increase of population of certain countries or races; this, to be sure, by a method as wise as it is ruthless.. She diminishes, not the power of procreation as such, but the conservation of the procreated, by exposing them to hard trials and deprivations with the result that all those who are less strong and less healthy are forced back into the womb of the eternal unknown. Those whom she permits to survive the inclemency of existence are a thousandfold tested, hardened, and well adapted to procreate in turn, in order that the process of thoroughgoing selection may begin again from the beginning. By thus brutally proceeding against the individual and immediately calling him back to herself as soon as he shows himself unequal to the storm of life, she keeps the race and species strong, in fact, raises them to the highest accomplishments.

Just as hunger, not greed, has a legitimate purpose, so the sexual instinct has been implanted by Nature solely for the propagation of the species, not for the kindling of insatiable longings,” he said. “Destroy wrong desires now; otherwise they will remain with you after the astral body has been separated from its physical casing. Even when the flesh is weak, the mind should be constantly resistant. If temptation assails you with cruel force, overcome it by impersonal analysis and indomitable will. Every natural passion can be mastered. “Conserve your powers. Be like the capacious ocean, absorbing quietly all the tributary rivers of the senses. Daily renewed sense yearnings sap your inner peace; they are like openings in a reservoir that permit vital waters to be wasted in the desert soil of materialism. The forceful, activating impulse of wrong desire is the greatest enemy to the happiness of man. Roam in the world as a lion of self-control; don’t let the frogs of sense weakness kick you around!” A

It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature...scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the same of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere support of a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary...

If to a person religion means reading books and obeying every single word from it without the slightest bit of reasoning, then such perception would only bring destruction upon the person and the world. Also there are people who use the words from those books to justify their own filthy actions. Let’s take a conservative Muslim, for example. Say, the conservative Muslim male Homo sapiens (I won’t call such creature a human, regardless of the religion, since his action here shows no sign of humanity) is found to be beating his wife. Now, if someone says to him “this is wrong”, he would naturally reply, “this is a divine thing to do, my book says so”. Now, if a Christian says “my book is older, so you should stop obeying your book and start obeying mine”, there will come the Buddhist, and say, “my book is much older still, obey mine”. Then will come the Jew, and say, “my book is even older, so just follow mine”. And in the end will come the Hindu and say “my books are the oldest of all, obey them”. Therefore referring to books will only make a mess of the human race and tear the species into pieces.

I encounter forms of this attitude every day. The producers who work at the Ostankino channels might all be liberals in their private lives, holiday in Tuscany, and be completely European in their tastes. When I ask how they marry their professional and personal lives, they look at me as if I were a fool and answer: “Over the last twenty years we’ve lived through a communism we never believed in, democracy and defaults and mafia state and oligarchy, and we’ve realized they are illusions, that everything is PR.” “Everything is PR” has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as “human rights” and “freedom” as a blunder. “Can’t you see your own governments are just as bad as ours?” they ask me. I try to protest—but they just smile and pity me. To believe in something and stand by it in this world is derided, the ability to be a shape-shifter celebrated. Vladimir Nabokov once described a species of butterfly that at an early stage in its development had to learn how to change colors to hide from predators. The butterfly’s predators had long died off, but still it changed its colors from the sheer pleasure of transformation. Something similar has happened to the Russian elites: during the Soviet period they learned to dissimulate in order to survive; now there is no need to constantly change their colors, but they continue to do so out of a sort of dark joy, conformism raised to the level of aesthetic act. Surkov himself is the ultimate expression of this psychology. As I watch him give his speech to the students and journalists, he seems to change and transform like mercury, from cherubic smile to demonic stare, from a woolly liberal preaching “modernization” to a finger-wagging nationalist, spitting out willfully contradictory ideas: “managed democracy,” “conservative modernization.” Then he steps back, smiling, and says: “We need a new political party, and we should help it happen, no need to wait and make it form by itself.” And when you look closely at the party men in the political reality show Surkov directs, the spitting nationalists and beetroot-faced communists, you notice how they all seem to perform their roles with a little ironic twinkle.

We cannot casually accept the loss of oaks without also accepting the loss of thousands of other plants and animals that depend on them. Oak declines in the United Kingdom, for example, threaten the survival of some 2,300 other species (Mitchell et al. 2019). Fortunately, there is no reason why we should accept the loss of oaks as inevitable; there is no trick to restoring oak populations, and no shortage of places in which to restore them. If you were to add up the amount of land in various types of built landscapes that is not dedicated to agriculture—suburban developments, urban parks, golf courses, mine reclamation sites, and so forth—it would total 603 million acres, a full 33% of our lower 48 states. We have not targeted these places for conservation in the past, but that was back when our conservation model was based on the notion that humans and their tailings were here and nature was someplace else. That model of mutual exclusion has failed us dismally; there simply are not enough untrammeled places left to sustain the natural world that until now has sustained us. Our only option, then, is to find ways to coexist with other species. That’s right, we must construct ecosystems that contain all their functional parts right where humans abound.

If our landscaping choices can rebuild populations of a butterfly thought to be extinct without listing it under the Endangered Species Act and without investing one dime of limited conservation funds—that is, without even trying—imagine what we can do if we include conservation as one of the goals of our gardens.

There is “colossal arrogance“, he maintains, in the assumption that humans will last forever. If one looks at the planet’s life across billions of years, rather than in terms of humankind’s meager history as a dominant species, we will see that our presence on earth has lasted the blink of an eye. “We are the agents of our own destruction - and when we are gone, extinguished by our own heedless quest for expansion, the planet will not mourn us. Indeed, it will have cause to rejoice. Today, the human species stands at the brink of a new mass extinction which will see, if not it’s disappearance, then its extreme marginalization./ for the first time in human history, the destruction - already apparent – is global. In times past, children and grandchildren were seen as a blessing, a sign of faith in the future of the gene pool. Now, it would seem that the kindest thing to do for our grandchildren is to refrain from generating them. “ Although more conservative and measured than the planetarian on the TV, Modak’s underlying message seems to be that pessimism is the new realism. I do not doubt his projections or his figures or his graphs. But his conclusions depress me.

Homo sapiens, she once told me, is an unusually successful species. And it is the fate of every successful species to wipe itself out—that is the way things work in biology. By “wipe itself out” Margulis didn’t necessarily mean extinction—just that something comprehensively bad would happen, wrecking the human enterprise. Borlaug and Vogt might have wanted to stop us from destroying ourselves, she would have said, but they were kidding themselves. Neither conservation nor technology has anything to do with biological reality.

One thing her trip taught, and that is apparent to scientists studying the pronghorn, is the vital importance of “connectivity.” It is a lesson being learned, and preached, by innovative environmental thinkers all over the West, and it applies to many of the region’s threatened species. It comes down to a simple point: wild animals need to roam. It’s true that putting land aside for our national parks may be, to paraphrase Stegner paraphrasing Lord Bryce, the best idea our country ever had, and it’s also true that at this point we have put aside more than 100 million acres of land, a tremendous accomplishment that we should be proud of. But what we are now learning is that parks are not enough. By themselves they are islands—particularly isolated and small islands—the sort of islands where many conservation biologists say species go to die. That would change if the parks were connected, and connecting the parks, and other wild lands, is the mission of an old friend of Ed Abbey’s, Dave Foreman. Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, eventually soured on the politics of the organization he helped create. In recent years he has focused his energy on his Wildlands Project, whose mission is the creation of a great wilderness corridor from Canada to Mexico, a corridor that takes into account the wider ranges of our larger predators. Parks alone can strand animals, and leave species vulnerable, unless connected by what Foreman calls “linkages.” He believes that if we can connect the remaining wild scraps of land, we can return the West to being the home of a true wilderness. He calls the process “rewilding.” Why go to all this effort? Because dozens of so-called protected species, stranded on their eco-islands, are dying out. And because when they are gone they will not return. A few more shopping malls, another highway or gas patch, and there is no more path for the pronghorn. But there is an even more profound reason for trying to return wildness to the West. “We finally learned that wilderness is the arena of evolution,” writes Foreman. Wilderness is where change happens.

Each terrarium functions as an island park for the animals inside it. Ascensions cause hybridization and ultimately new species. The more traditional biomes conserve species that on Earth are radically endangered or extinct in the wild. Some terraria even look like zoos; more are purely wilderness refugia; and most mix parkland and human spaces in patterned habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole. As such, these spaces are already crucial to humanity and the Earth. And

After Steve’s death I received letters of condolence from people all over the world. I would like to thank everyone who sent such thoughtful sympathy. Your kind words and support gave me the strength to write this book and so much more. Carolyn Male is one of those dear people who expressed her thoughts and feelings after we lost Steve. It was incredibly touching and special, and I wanted to express my appreciation and gratitude. I’m happy to share it with you. It is with a still-heavy heart that I rise this evening to speak about the life and death of one of the greatest conservationists of our time: Steve Irwin. Many people describe Steve Irwin as a larrikin, inspirational, spontaneous. For me, the best way I can describe Steve Irwin is formidable. He would stand and fight, and was not to be defeated when it came to looking after our environment. When he wanted to get things done--whether that meant his expansion plans for the zoo, providing aid for animals affected by the tsunami and the cyclones, organizing scientific research, or buying land to conserve its environmental and habitat values--he just did it, and woe betide anyone who stood in his way. I am not sure I have ever met anyone else who was so determined to get the conservation message out across the globe, and I believe he achieved his aim. What I admired most about him was that he lived the conservation message every day of his life. Steve’s parents, Bob and Lyn, passed on their love of the Australian bush and their passion for rescuing and rehabilitating wildlife. Steve took their passion and turned it into a worldwide crusade. The founding of Wildlife Warriors Worldwide in 2002 provided Steve and Terri with another vehicle to raise awareness of conservation by allowing individuals to become personally involved in protecting injured, threatened, or endangered wildlife. It also has generated a working fund that helps with the wildlife hospital on the zoo premises and supports work with endangered species in Asia and Africa. Research was always high on Steve’s agenda, and his work has enabled a far greater understanding of crocodile behavior, population, and movement patterns. Working with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service and the University of Queensland, Steve was an integral part of the world’s first Crocs in Space research program. His work will live on and inform us for many, many years to come. Our hearts go out to his family and the Australia Zoo family. It must be difficult to work at the zoo every day with his larger-than-life persona still very much evident. Everyone must still be waiting for him to walk through the gate. His presence is everywhere, and I hope it lives on in the hearts and minds of generations of wildlife warriors to come. We have lost a great man in Steve Irwin. It is a great loss to the conservation movement. My heart and the hearts of everyone here goes out to his family. Carolyn Male, Member for Glass House, Queensland, Australia October 11, 2006

And yet we have already grown well beyond the earth’s limits. The last time planet Earth was able to support the human enterprise sustainably—that is, provide for human needs without degrading the principle of the earth’s ecological bank account—was 1975, when the earth’s population was 4 billion (Juniper 2013). As I write in 2018, global population is approaching 7.5 billion, and we have seriously degraded the earth’s carrying capacity—not only for humans, but for other species as well.

What if zoos stopped breeding all their animals, with the possible exception of any endangered species with a real chance of being re-released into the wild? What if they sent all the animals that need really large areas or lots of freedom and socialization to refuges? With apes, elephants, big cats, and other large and smart species gone, they could expand enclosures for the rest of the animals, concentrating on keeping them lavishly happy until their natural deaths. Eventually, the only animals on display would be a few ancient holdovers from the old menageries, some animals in active conservation breeding programs, and perhaps a few rescues. Such 'zoos' might even be merged with sanctuaries, places that take wild animal that -- because injury or a lifetime of captivity -- cannot live in the wild. Existing refuges, like Wolf Haven, often do allow visitors, but not all animal are on the tour, just those who seem like it. Their facilities are really arranged for the animals, not for the people. These refuge-zoos could become places where animal live not in order to be on display, but in order to live. Display would be incidental.

Farmers have been extremely conservative. Throughout the world there are 148 species of large animals and yet only fourteen of these have been domesticated as farm animals, grown for meat, milk or wool, or all three, or used to supply muscle-power to pull carts, ploughs or carry people.

Aside from the broader picture, species have intrinsic worth and are deserving of preservation. Surely an oddity such as C. vicinella cannot simply be allowed to vanish. We should speak up on behalf of this little moth, not only because by so doing we would bolster conservation efforts now underway in Florida, but because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing.

A supposedly daring insight came up, disguised as a question: Dr. Cole, aren't humans the most invasive species of all? She'd fielded that one many times before, during public lectures and even in her days as a teaching assistant [...] 'I'm not unsympathetic to that line of thinking,' she answered, 'but even if it's true, we're also the only species in any position to do anything about it.

Due to poaching and global warming, future generations will not be able to see some animal and plant species given the rate at which they are disappearing from the forests and seas. Both vices are man-made and man must be challenged and confronted on these global issues. Park rangers, armies and nature conservation trusts are still grappling to find lasting solutions – will you join them in this fight?

On Terra, if he’d ever attempted to work as a medical practitioner, my species would have retaliated with conservative resistance. Which meant reviving public stonings and lynch mobs. Dr.

There are over 1,200 species of bat in the world and not one of them is blind. There are 4,800 species of frog in the world but only one of them goes ‘ribbit’. Eight times as many people belong to the National Trust as to the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties combined. Every human being starts out life as an arsehole: it’s the first part of the body to form in the womb.

common sense conservatives had become an endangered species in the corridors of power, time and again losing primaries to populists who when it came right down to it really didn’t know what the heck they were doing. They were great at campaigning

in Solution Most chemical reactions that occur on the earth’s surface, whether in living organisms or among inorganic substances, take place in aqueous solution. Chemical reactions carried out between substances in solution obey the requirements of stoichiometry discussed in Chapter 2, in the sense that the conservation laws embodied in balanced chemical equations are always in force. But here we must apply these requirements in a slightly different way. Instead of a conversion between masses and number of moles, using the molar mass as a conversion factor, the conversion is now between solution volumes and number of moles, with the concentration as the conversion factor. For instance, consider the reaction that is used commercially to prepare elemental bromine from its salts in solution: 2 Br � (aq) � Cl2(aq) 02 Cl � (aq) � Br2(aq) Suppose there is 50.0 mL of a 0.0600 M solution of NaBr. What volume of a 0.0500 M solution of Cl2 is needed to react completely with the Br � ? To answer this, find the number of moles of bromide ion present: 0.0500 L � (0.0600 mol L �1 ) � 3.00 � 10 �3 mol Br � Next, use the chemical conversion factor 1 mol of Cl2 per 2 mol of Br � to find moles Cl2 reacting � 3.00 � 10 �3 mol Br � a 1 mol Cl2 2 mol Br � b � 1.50 � 10 �3 mol Cl2 Finally, find the necessary volume of aqueous chlorine: 1.50 � 10 �3 mol � 3.00 � 10 �2 L solution 0.0500 mol L �1 The reaction requires 3.00 � 10 �2 L, or 30.0 mL, of the Cl2 solution.(In practice, an excess of Cl2 solution would be used to ensure more nearly complete conversion of the bromide ion to bromine. ) The chloride ion concentration after completion of the reaction might also be of interest. Because each mole of bromide ion that reacts gives 1 mol of chloride ion in the products, the number of moles of Cl � produced is 3.00 � 10 �3 mol. The final volume of the solution is 0.0800 L, so the final concentration of Cl � is [Cl � ] � 3.00 � 10 �3 mol � 0.0800 L 0.0375 M Square brackets around a chemical symbol signify the molarity of that species.

...the tiger is a bellwether--one of thousands of similarly vulnerable species, which are, at once, casualties of our success and symbols of our failure. The current moment is proof of our struggle to evolve (perhaps "mature" is a better word) beyond outmoded fears and attitudes, to face the fact that nature is neither our enemy nor our slave.

Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In the country inhabited by the Ka’apor, on the mainland southeast of Marajó, centuries of tinkering have profoundly changed the forest community. In Ka’apor-managed forests, according to Balée’s plant inventories, almost half of the ecologically important species are those used by humans for food. In similar forests that have not recently been managed, the figure is only 20 percent. Balée cautiously estimated, in a widely cited article published in 1989, that at least 11.8 percent, about an eighth, of the nonflooded Amazon forest was “anthropogenic”—directly or indirectly created by humans. Some researchers today regard this figure as conservative. “I basically think it’s all human created,” Clement told me. So does Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. “Some of my colleagues would say that’s pretty radical,” he said. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, “lots” of researchers believe that “what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.” The phrase “built environment,” Erickson argued, “applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.

If a geographic place rapidly changes in a way that demeans its natural integrity, then children’s early attachment to land is at risk. If children do not attach to the land, they will not reap the psychological and spiritual benefits they can glean from nature, nor will they feel a long-term commitment to the environment, to the place. This lack of attachment will exacerbate the very conditions that created the sense of disengagement in the first place—fueling a tragic spiral, in which our children and the natural world are increasingly detached. I am not suggesting the situation is hopeless. Far from it. Conservation and environmental groups and, in some cases, the traditional Scouting organizations are beginning to awaken to the threat to nature posed by nature-deficit disorder. A few of these organizations, as we will see, are helping to lead the way toward a nature-child reunion. They recognize that while knowledge about nature is vital, passion is the long-distance fuel for the struggle to save what is left of our natural heritage and—through an emerging green urbanism—to reconstitute lost land and water. Passion does not arrive on videotape or on a CD; passion is personal. Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.

Although justifications for wild meat harvest in terms of food for impoverished communities must be weighed seriously, it is critical to acknowledge that the terms ‘protein’ and ‘meat’ are not synonymous.

When creation and evolution are thought to be incompatible, three problematic presumptions are often at work: 1. by creation is meant the biblical story of creation in Genesis 1, understood as a historical event, 2. Genesis 1 and evolutionary theory each describes the origin of living species, and 3. we must choose between them. If these presumptions are indeed at work, then we have engaged this controversy in terms shaped by fundamentalists, the most conservative of Christian traditions.

To protect and preserve our shared planet, it is our responsibility to save species which are about to be extinct.

Already we have on show a number of creatures which no other zoo possesses and we hope in the future when funds permit to concentrate on those species which are threatened with extinction. Many of the animals on show are ones I collected myself. This is, as I said before, the best part of having one’s own zoo; one can bring the animals back for it, watch their progress, watch them breed, go out and visit them at any hour of the day or night. This is the selfish pleasure of one’s own zoo. But also I hope that, in a small way, I am interesting people in animal life and in its conservation. If I accomplish this I will consider that I have achieved something worthwhile.

The American species (to the extent that there really is such a thing) is, of course, populist rather than conservative—and for a very forceful reason: America happens to be the only society in creation built by conscious human intent…and developed, by Europeans tired of Europe’s ancient commitments, and determined,…each in his own way, on a “new beginning.

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. *

To make good environmental decision, we must stop focusing on trying to remove or undo human influence, on turning back time or freezing the non-human world in amber. We must instead acknowledge the extent to which we have influenced our current world and take some responsibility for its future trajectory…We should not seek to carefully control every plant and animal on the planet. We couldn’t even if we wanted to.

Most big freshwater fish, in most parts of the world, have all but disappeared from most places where they used to live. As with arapaima, the main reason is over-harvesting, but there are other factors too. Dams block the migration routes of many fish, so they disappear from the water above the dam — or even altogether, if breeding grounds are cut off. Draining of floodplains, cutting off backwaters, competition from invasive species and pollution also play a part. And sometimes it's just willful slaughter, as was the case with the North American alligator gar in the early 1900s, thanks to the incorrect assumption that killing these predators would boost populations of ‘game’ fish.

Wolves as symbols of wilderness are so culturally important that we humans will go to great lengths to protect the species purity, even if doing so involves restricting the freedom of actual animals. Wildness is often defined as that which is not controlled, but paradoxically, in order to protect the 'wildness' of the wolf gene pool, individual wolves must be controlled.