Best 162 quotes in «extinction quotes» category

No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

Oil is dead, on its way to extinction.

One in eight plant species face extinction.

On an overcrowded planet where more species slip toward extinction every day, should one species have the right to multiply and consume at will, even as it nudges others to oblivion?

One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.

Racism, pollution and the rest of it are themselves very close to extinction.

Since after extinction no one will be present to take responsibility, we have to take full responsibility now.

The alternative to extinction is stagnation, and stagnation is seldom a good thing.

The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to EMOTIONALLY comprehend the exponential function.

Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.

The buffaloes are gone. And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

The diminution of public virtue is usually attended with that of public happiness, and the public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals.

The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

The public image of dinosaurs is tainted by extinction. It's hard to accept dinosaurs as a success when they are all dead. But the fact of ultimate extinction should not make us overlook the absolutely unsurpassed role dinosaurs played in the history of life.

There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction

There is a beginning and end to all life - and to all human endeavors. Species evolve and die off. Empires rise, then break apart. Businesses grow, then fold. There are no exceptions. I'm OK with all that. Yet it pains me to bear witness to the sixth great extinction, where we humans are directly responsible for the extirpation of so many wonderful creatures and invaluable indigenous cultures. It saddens me to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems.

The once rather old-fashioned science of paleontology finds itself in a maelstrom of excitement and controversy. Astrophysicists, atmospheric scientists, geochemists, geophysicists, and statisticians are all contributing to the extinction problem. And the general public is taking part through television talk shows, magazine cover stories, newspaper editorials, and even the occasional mention in gossip columns.

The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

There is a peculiar pathos in the extinction of a nation.

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)

The technical definition of the Holocene has to do with the extinction of a snail species in Sicily.

We have decisively changed the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the rate of extinction.

Today, due to the massive Chinese population transfer, the nation of Tibet truly faces the threat of extinction, along with its unique cultural heritage of Buddhist spirituality.

We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity's sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.

To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway.

We are in the midst of the 6th largest extinction event in the history of the plant and the first caused by human action.

We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals.

A 24,000-year sequence recorded in a marine core from the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of California, exhibits the highest peak in biomass burning precisely at the onset of the Younger Dryas. ... This anomalously high peak correlates with intense biomass burning documented from the nearby Channel Islands. ... The peak also coincides with the extinction of pygmy mammoths on the islands and with the beginning of an apparent 600-800-year gap in the archaeological record, suggesting a sudden collapse in island human populations.

We live in a time where we have more extinction happening on our planet than since the dinosaurs were wiped out 50 million years ago.

What I really wanted was to travel and see all the different animals that were on the verge of extinction.

What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?

... why are so many religious people arguing about the origin of the species but so few concerned about the extinction of the species?

Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

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

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

And I've been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds.

And that is what Mauritius is most famous for: the extinction of the dodo.

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.

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

Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will d better to seek out the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.

But the Anthropocene isn’t a novel phenomenon of the last few centuries. Already tens of thousands of years ago, when our Stone Age ancestors spread from East Africa to the four corners of the earth, they changed the flora and fauna of every continent and island on which they settled. They drove to extinction all the other human species of the world, 90 per cent of the large animals of Australia, 75 per cent of the large mammals of America and about 50 per cent of all the large land mammals of the planet – and all before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

As the discoverer and principal excavator of Murray Springs, [...] Haynes deserves credit for drawing attention to a very curious aspect of the site--a distinct dark layer of soil draped 'like a shrink-wrap,' as Allen West puts it, over the top of the Clovis remains and of the extinct megafauna--including Eloise. Haynes has identified this 'black mat' (his term) not only at Murray Springs but at dozens of other sites across North America, and was the first to acknowledge its clear and obvious association with the Late Pleistocene Extinction Event. he speaks of the 'remarkable circumstances' surrounding the event, the abrupt die-off on a continental scale of all large mammals 'immediately before deposition of the ... black mat,' and the total absence thereafter of 'mammoth, mastodon, horse, camel, dire wold, American lion, tapir and other [megafauna], as well as Clovis people.' Haynes notes also that 'The basal black mat contact marks a major climate change from the warm dry climate of the terminal Allerod to the glacially cold Younger Dryas.' From roughly 18,000 years ago, and for several thousand years thereafter, global temperatures had been slowly but steadily rising and the ice sheets melting. Our ancestors would have had reason to hope that earth's long winter was at last coming to an end and that a new era of congenial climate beckoned. This process of warming became particularly pronounced after about 14,500 years ago. Then suddenly, around 12,800 years ago, the direction of climate change reversed and the world turned dramatically, instantly cold--as cold as it had been at the peak of the Ice Age many thousands of years earlier. This deep freeze--the mysterious epoch now known as the Younger Dryas--lasted for approximately 1,200 years until 11,600 years ago, at which point the climate flipped again, global temperatures shot up rapidly, the remnant ice sheets melted and collapsed into the oceans, and the world became as warm as it is today.

[Curtis Carley, first field coordinator for the Red Wolf Recovery Program] decided early in the project that there was only one possible way of saving red wolves from genetic swamping by coyotes. Biologists were going to have to capture every red wolf remaining in the wild for placement in a captive breeding program. In effect, preserving the red wolf's purity required first bringing about its extinction in the wild and turning its former range over to coyotes and hybrids until biologists could produce enough "pure" animals, then finding a suitable protected preserve for releasing a captive-bred population into the wild again. How difficult was that? After establishing a certified breeding program for red wolves at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, Washington, in 1974 and 1975, the Red Wolf Recovery team decided to examine as breeding candidates some fifty red wolves held in almost twenty zoos across the country. Using the morphology-howl criteria they had established, out of those fifty they identified but a single red wolf, a female in the Oklahoma City Zoo. They were convinced all the rest, plus their pups, were actually either coyotes or hybrids, and in the latter case the team insisted they be destroyed. When some of the shocked zoo personnel refused such a draconian order, in the name of purity Curtis Carley carried out the death sentences himself.

Caught in the center of a soundless field While hot inexplicable hours go by What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed? You seem to ask. I make a sharp reply, Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain Just in what jaws you were to suppurate: You may have thought things would come right again If you could only keep quite still and wait.