40 Biodiversity Quotes Celebrating And Protecting All Life

"It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for– the whole thing– rather than just one or two stars."
- David Attenborough

"We don't own the planet Earth, we belong to it. And we must share it with our wildlife."
- Steve Irwin

"If an endemic is lost from its assemblage, it disappears globally and the legacy of many thousands of generations of natural selection are irrevocably lost as well."
- Mark V Lomolino

"Animals are, like us, endangered species on an endangered planet, and we are the ones who are endangering them, it, and ourselves. They are innocent sufferers in a hell of our making."
- Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

"People still do not understand that a live fish is more valuable than a dead one, and that destructive fishing techniques are taking a wrecking ball to biodiversity."
- Sylvia Earle

"Without knowing it, we utilize hundreds of products each day that owe their origin to wild animals and plants. Indeed our welfare is intimately tied up with the welfare of wildlife. Well may conservationists proclaim that by saving the lives of wild species, we may be saving our own."
- Norman Myers

"The fact is that no species has ever had such wholesale control over everything on Earth, living or dead, as we now have. That lays upon us, whether we like it or not, an awesome responsibility. In our hands now lies not only our own future, but that of all other living creatures with whom we share the Earth."
- David Attenborough

"Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity."
- Dan Lipinski

"We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own."
- Diane Ackerman

"Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth."
- Gary Larson

"Even if we act immediately, the world is doomed to lose many of its animal and plant species and this in turn will reduce the ability of ecosystems to deliver vital services to human populations. The Red List gives all of us a practical tool for raising awareness of the biodiversity crisis and for forging new partnerships within the international community."
- Achim Steiner

"Collective human actions are transforming, even raving, the biosphere – perhaps irreversibly – through global warming and loss of biodiversity."
- Lord Martin Rees

"It's not a requirement to eat animals, we just chose to do it, so it becomes a moral choice and one that is having a huge impact on the planet, using up resources and destroying the biosphere."
- James Cameron

"It’s a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species."
- David Attenborough

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change."
- Charles Darwin

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

"The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchild may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?"
- David Attenborough

"Although biodiversity loss continues globally, many countries are significantly slowing the rate of loss by shoring up protected natural areas and the services they provide, and in expanding national park systems with tighter management and more secure funding."
- Helen Clark

"Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone."
- Donella Meadows

"What is a fish without a river? What is a bird without a tree to nest in? What is an endangered species act without any enforcement mechanism to ensure their habitat is protected? It is nothing."
- Jay Inslee

"The living world is a unique and spectacular marvel. Billions of individuals, and millions of kinds of plants and animals …. Working together to benefit from the energy of the sun and the minerals of the earth. Leading lives that interlock in such a way that they sustain each other. We rely entirely on this finely tuned life-support machine. And it relies on its biodiversity to run smoothly. Yet the way we humans live on Earth now is sending biodiversity into a decline."
- Sir David Attenborough

"Planet Earth shelters millions of species. Myriad species have already gone extinct and yet, putting trust in the theory of evolution, we can expect many more species to come into existence in the future. Humans, like any other species, are just a by-product of an extremely long and eternal evolutionary process."
- Shivanshu K. Srivastava

"The most commonly used measure of biodiversity is species richness, which simply means the number of species in one place. But that measure alone does not tell us how healthy an ecosystem is. For example, think of a pristine coral reef and an overfished coral reef. The pristine reef might have dozens of gray reef sharks, whereas the overfished reef could have just one shark left."
- Enric Sala

"I can't imagine anything more important than air, water, soil, energy and biodiversity. These are the things that keep us alive."
- David Suzuki

"The nation's biological diversity has great economic, aesthetic, and spiritual value."
- Ecological Society of America

"To many people, 'biodiversity' is almost synonymous with the word 'nature,' and 'nature' brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species."
- Cary Fowler

"The beliefs I was raised with - to respect animals and to be aware of nature, to understand that we share this planet with other creatures - have had a huge impact on me."
- Stella McCartney

"I'm very concerned for the future of the earth and its amazing creatures. We've got to be careful and make sure we don't foul our own nest."
- John Lithgow

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

"Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future."
- Frans Lanting

"A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree."
- Dr. E.O. Wilson

"By driving other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the branch on which it sits."
- Paul R. Ehrlich

"The only biodiversity we're going to have left is Coke versus Pepsi. We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time."
- Chuck Palahniuk

"We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity."
- Dr. E.O. Wilson

"The cutting of primeval forest and other disasters, fueled by the demands of growing human populations, are the overriding threat to biological diversity everywhere."
- Dr. E.O. Wilson

"The one process now going on, that will take millions of years to correct, is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us."
- Dr. E.O. Wilson

"This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms-folded them into its genes-and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady."
- Dr. E.O. Wilson

"When you leave intact as many species as possible, in a major habitat, whether it's a pond or a bay or a forest somewhere,” he said, “the better it functions. And the better it functions, the better it serves."
- Dr. E.O. Wilson

"Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work. Genetic engineers don't make new genes, they rearrange existing ones."
- Thomas E. Lovejoy

"Just imagine the banner headlines if a marine biologist were to discover a species of dolphin that wove large, intricately meshed fishing nets, twenty dolphin-lengths in diameter! Yet we take a spider web for granted, as a nuisance in the house rather than as one of the wonders of the world. And think of the furore if Jane Goodall returned from Gombe stream with photographs of wild chimpanzees building their own houses, well roofed and insulated, of painstakingly selected stones neatly bonded and mortared! Yet caddis larvae, who do precisely that, command only passing interest."
- Richard Dawkins