Threats To Biodiversity Quotes

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.

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

Sex thus represents a defending mechanism of long-term biodiversity, versus cloning that would trend strongly toward competition. Although competitive traits never go away, their intensity and distribution are moderated, and sexuality powerfully lowers the curve of increasing aggressive tendency within any species. Sex as a key principle of biotic intimacy is a safety valve in nature against an ultimate, self-destructive integrity of aggressive replicators that would diminish life's complexity and turn evolutionary expression toward a brutish simplicity. In the long run, sex may protect against the threat of bottlenecking gene pools with populations envisioned by Tennyson-"red in tooth and claw"-having impoverished endowment for survival in a world of change on many fronts.

One of the main reasons why this civilisation is finished and why collapse is now so likely is the rank failure of mass media to be honest about the horrific decline in biodiversity (i.e., in life on Earth) and about human-caused climate-decline being a white swan and a mortal threat.

The freshwater fish crisis is a manifestation of the complex interplay between climate change and a myriad of human-induced threats. Recognising the interconnectedness of these challenges is the first step towards crafting effective solutions.

Our Greatest Threat to Biodiversity [10w] The threat to conservation is the connection between luxury and scarcity.

We have to now been shielded from the greatest threat to our biodiversity. That threat is us.

You, too, can have your own little slice of paradise; all you have to do is destroy that paradise in the process. This kind of banal desire, and the greed that sold it, has been Florida’s true destruction. Developers pitted man versus nature, not as it had been before as a struggle for survival out in a harsh and remote wilderness, but as a struggle to uphold a false hierarchy of creation. Humans are more important than animals, they said. The soil is ours to scourge and conquer. Marketing has convinced us that trivial luxuries are more important than the natural world, as if we are not part of the natural world ourselves, as if our consumption is not a bid against our own interests, one in favor of concrete and routine against the unwieldy and awe-inspiring, monotony against biodiversity, pesticides against night music, the greed of a few against life itself on our planet. Dozens of species go extinct every day, with perhaps a million more under threat of extinction within our lifetime. Corporate greed tells us this doesn’t merit our attention. If you feel bad, cut back on your own, because it’s certainly not their fault. Such PR sleight of hand shifts the blame, feeds our guilt, inflames our anxiety, convinces us to consume more and more, until we give up caring, if we ever cared at all. Without thinking, we have become numb to the quiet collapse going on around us. Everything is connected. A species dying is a piece of our world dying. If the world dies, we die, too.

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

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.

...a study of all 50 U.S. States found that those states marked out by large inequalities of power in terms of income and ethnicity had weaker environmental policies and suffered greater ecological degradation. Furthermore, one study covering 50 countries found the more unequal a country is, the more likely the biodiversity of its landscape is to be under threat.

One... misconception is the idea that England is now mostly concreted over. Coupled to this is the idea that the onward march of bricks and mortar is the main cause of declining species and habitats. Neither assertion is true. Just 8.8 per cent of England is built on; 73 per cent is farmland, and 10 per cent is forestry. The biggest drivers of biodiversity loss in this country are modern agriculture, forestry and shooting. ...the greatest threat to the countryside comes from within it.

Furthermore, one study covering 50 countries found that the more unequal a country is, the more likely is the biodiversity of its landscape to be under threat.24