Best 227 quotes in «conservation quotes» category

Re-wilding is a story of nature's amazing capacity to rebound. It tells of the resilience of birch and pine, the dogged persistence of badger and fox, of dandelion and vine, the dark and voiceless worlds of algae and fungi.

Save the trees! Return to the gold standard!

Short term interventions will call for more guns and force in affected areas, in order to protect the vulnerable and suppress proliferation of terrorism and sectarian hatred, but the forward-looking leadership driving for sustainable solutions must now promote deliberate intents to influence systems of education, belief, culture, values and attitudes to promote tolerance, mutual respect, love and hope for all to succeed. If this area was given the same kind of attention and resources that HIV-AIDS has received to date, I can promise you, the same progress made in the containment of HIV-AIDS, would also have been made on the extremism front.

She put her hands on her hips. "You're not human." "Neither are you." "I beg your pardon?" "Ethereal comes to mind.

That which we allow to exist, to flourish freely according to its own rhythms, is superior to anything our little hands create.

Societies that lack respect for animals eventually lose respect for human beings.

Still following the rules, huh?" He grabbed his shift off the back of the kitchen chair and pulled it on. "Still breaking them?" she fired back.

Tell me you're bare underneath the dress." She gulped. "I'm bare underneath this dress." Gently dropping her arms back to her sides, he slid his finger down the center of her chest. Tingles shot out from the tips of her breasts and gathered at the base of her spine, between her legs. "Tell me you want me as much as I want you," he said, his voice husky. Never had she imagined doing something as reckless as sleeping with a guy for one night. But this wasn't any guy. And it wasn't just about her getting off--God, how she needed to do that. It was about closure. Saying goodbye on her terms. It might be a bad idea, but it was the best bad idea she'd ever had. She dropped the panties and put her hands on his chest. "I want you.

The activities of La Condamine, Humboldt, Wallace, Bates, and other such explorers touched on only the tiniest fraction of the vastness of a world so expansive as to be impervious to harm. But today, the Amazon River Basin, occupying more than 2.7 million square miles is at our fingertips and is considered one of the most ecologically threatened regions of the world.

So because you are converting it, you are actually conserving it.

Surely our people do not understand even yet the rich heritage that is theirs. There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever, with their majesty all unmarred.

Terrorist groups will not, in most instances, openly recruit from universities or the well developed areas that politicians and business leaders are always focusing on. They will not flight newspaper or TV adverts, but will use belief systems riding on the back of disadvantages, poverty and problems that have remained unaddressed in particular communities, tribal and religious ideologies. They will recruit the most vulnerable to harm and attack the most vulnerable, in order to spite leaders and authorities.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That lands yields a cultural harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.

The albatross hit the top and canted her soft belly to the storm, and made a screaming banked peel-out downwind and over the other side. I don't know if anyone else on the ship saw her. To me, she was a visitation. Not harbinger or annunciation, but a simple reminder of a wold that worked, that was at home with itself and friends with storm.

The challenge is clear: we have to conserve and improve the soil we have, and we need to turn dirt into soil wherever people need to grow food. That's true in America's breadbasket, it's true in the tropics, and it's true in the dry, hardscrabble, weathered soils that cover much of sub- Saharan Africa.

The love for God is the love to protect the environment.

The intent behind Earth Hour is not just about turning off lights for an hour; It is to remind us of our responsibility towards environmental conservation.

The love for God is the love for nature.

The earth had granted me a lifeline, by letting me siphon off some of the water that was on its way somewhere else. Because of me, there would be less water flowing into the Chattahoochee River: less for the speckled trout, less for the wood ducks, less for the mountain laurel that drop their white petals into the river every fall. There would be more water flowing into my septic tank, laced with laundry detergent, dish soap, and human waste. At that moment of high awareness, I promised the land that I would go easy on the water. I would remember where it came from. I would remain grateful for the sacrifice.

The old man and the boy crouched as still as lizards

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.

The need for security and power riding on energies that should be making life better and easier for the masses remains a great error in leadership focus. Why should the discovery of uranium’s potential become a curse instead of a blessing? I am sure any type of power (nuclear and leadership included) in the wrong hands has the unfortunate potential to become a curse. A lot more is involved, including greed that causes the wealthy to sponsor violence and chaos. All, in order to profit from conflict, yet disregarding the harm caused to the vulnerable majority.

The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.

The only time I get to be alone is while traveling." "Except this week," Charlie said. He turned his head and she saw herself reflected in his shades. "True. And you're not at all what I expected." Not that Connor had had any idea what to expect. But he would've preferred if she hadn't been the beautiful blonde who wore skimpy red bikini tops and starred in his dreams last night.

..the planet is just too small for these developing countries to repeat the economic growth in the same way that the rich countries have done it in the past. We don't have enough natural resources, we don't have enough atmosphere. Clearly, something has to change.

There appears no assurance that in the times of our own grandchildren the world will contain viable populations of wild African Lions, Tigers, Polar Bears, Emperor Penguins, gorillas, or coral reefs. These are the animals expectant parents pain on nursery room walls. Their implied wish: to welcome precious new life in to a world endowed with the magnificence and delight and fright of companions we have traveled with since the beginning. Some people debate the “rights of the unborn” as though a human life begins at conception but we don’t need to concern ourselves with its prospects after birth. Raging over the divine sanctity of anyone else’s pregnancy is a little overwrought and a little too easy when nature itself terminates one out of four by the sixth week. There are much bigger, more compassionate pro-life fish to fry. Passing along a world that can allow real children to flourish and the cavalcade of generations to unfold, and the least to live in modest dignity would be the biggest pro-life enterprise we could undertake.

There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increase its value, its could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest.

There are many beautiful toys on this earth. We must use them with care so that the next generation will find them intact and use them also.

...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.

There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild plants and animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape.

there is such an unfortunate irony in photography these days. for as people pursue desires to visit and capture images of unspoiled landscapes. they inadvertently in the process turn these beautiful locations into anything but unspoiled, regardless of ideals of conservation. and more-so, so many ruin natural beauty by exploiting these magical places with their greed and dreams of success, and regrettable egos with overdeveloped look-at-me-syndromes...sadly sometimes, for so many of us, now the only way today to truly protect an unspoiled place is to not share its beautiful photo or location with anyone, anymore

There seems to be no way to save wildness from human intrusion without establishing and enforcing rules and regulations that are themselves intrusions on what, by definition, are meant to be areas outside humanity's control.

...there were only fifteen thousand polar bears in the world, and five billion of me. To let one of them devour my all-too-common flesh would, if only slightly, help adjust the grievous imbalance.

These steel monstrosities screamed night and day, blotted out the starlit skies and Northern Lights with flashing red strobes, slaughtered thousands of bats and entire flocks of birds banished tourism and wildlife, made people sick and drove them from their now-valueless homes.

There is an allegory for historians in the diverse functions of saw, wedge, and axe. The saw works only across the years, which it must deal with one by one, in sequence. From each year the raker teeth pull little chips of fact, which accumulate in little piles, called sawdust by woodsmen and archives by historians; both judge the character of what lies within by the character of the samples thus made visible without. It is not until the transect is complete that the tree falls, and the stump yields a collective view of the century. By its fall the tree attests the unity of the hodge-podge called history. The wedge on the other hand, works only in radial splits; such a split yields a collective view of all the years at once, or no view at all, depending on the skill with which the plane of the split is chosen[...] The axe functions only at an angle diagonal to the years, and this is only for the peripheral rings of the recent past. Its special function is to lop limbs, for which both the saw and wedge are useless. The three tools are requisite to good oak, and to good history.

There still remains a lot of space to share on earth, and overpopulation remains a perception. We put geographic and political boundaries around ourselves because of the need to rule and control. To find solutions, the current and future leader needs to go back to redefine underlying influences to relevant political, demographic and geographic systems. Will you take up the challenge and consider the possibilities?

The vision of the ideal life that we've been taught in the West, which is gaining ever more purchase in China and India and elsewhere, feeds the system we need to undo. Go to school in order to get a degree in order to get a job in order to earn money so you can try to buy happiness because your life sucks, then retire and die: this is not meaningful living.

The very desire to preserve animals was a subjective sentiment of fail in the animal's intrinsic worth. It was a feeling possessed by most of the scientists there, who regarded the wildebeeste migration with the same awe that others feel for the Mona Lisa, but they would not admit this sentiment into their arguments because it could not be backed up by facts; the right and worng of aesthetics being imponderables not open to scientific analysis. At the end of the meeting there was a consensus of opinion on only one fact, that there was an urgent need for research before taking any hasty action.

Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.

The work to protect one species benefits us all.

Thoreau the “Patron Saint of Swamps” because he enjoyed being in them and writing about them said, “my temple is the swamp… When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most impenetrable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum… I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place…far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty.

...though by then it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish the acts of God from the endeavors of men. The wind was God; of this they were confident. As were the mountains funneling the wind. But the sand, all that monstrous, infinite sand. Who had latticed the Southwest with a network of aqueducts? Who had drained first Owens Lake then Mono Lake, Mammoth Lake, Lake Havasu and so on, leaving behind wide white smears of dust? Who had diverted the coast's rainwater and sapped the Great Basin of its groundwater? Who had tunneled beneath Lake Mead, installed a gaping outlet at its bottommost point, and drained it like a sink? Who had sucked up the Ogallala Aquifer, the Rio Grande aquifer, the snowpack of the Sierras and the Cascades? If this was God, he went by new names: Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, City of San Diego, City of Phoenix, Arizona Water and Power, New Mexico Water Commission, Las Vegas Housing and Water Authority, Bureau of Land Management, United States Department of the Interior.

The writer Richard Manning has argued that 'the most destructive force in the American West is its commanding views, because they foster the illusion that we command.

To speak of sparing anything because it is beautiful is to waste one’s breath and incur ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense- the power to enjoy through the eye, and the ear, and the imagination- is just as important a factor in the scheme of human happiness as the corporeal sense of eating and drinking; but there has never been a time when the world would admit it.

Trithemius' concern for conservation was rare, indeed, and is a lesson to modern library managers who discard printed volumes, believing that e-books are the only way of the future.

To those who serve to protect the exotic animals in the rainforest. Thanks for making it possible for so many of them to remain in their natural habitat and for stopping those who are destroying the animals or transporting them from their homes in the wild.

True Compassion is showing Kindness towards animals, without expecting anything in return

We forest officers, who acquiesced in the extinguishment of the bear, knew a local rancher who had plowed up a dagger engraved with the name of one of Coronado´s captains. We spoke harshly of the Spaniards, who, in their zeal for gold and converts, had needlessly extinguished the native Indians. It did not occur to us that we, too, were the captains of an invasion too sure of its righteousness.

Unsportsmanlike predator-killing is always rationalized as defence of property—usually someone else’s property. This excuse is getting too thin to pass muster among thinking conservationists.

We are at a unique stage in our history. Never before have we had such an awareness of what we are doing to the planet, and never before have we had the power to do something about that. Surely we all have a responsibility to care for our Blue Planet. The future of humanity and indeed, all life on earth, now depends on us.