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

* We are committed with our lives to building a different model and a different future for humanity, the Earth, and other species. We have envisaged a moral alternative to economic globalization and we will not rest until we see it realized. -- Maude Barlow * No piecemeal solution is going to prevent the collapse of whole societies and ecosystems ... a radical re-thinking of our values, priorities and political systems is urgent. -- Maude Barlow

* "We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth's functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and geocide, the devastation of the earth itself." ~ Thomas Berry

"Each one [of the Earth's 5 million invertebrate species] plays a role in its ecosystem. It's like we're tearing the cogs out of a great machine. The machine might work after you tear out ten cogs, but what happens when you tear out a hundred?"
— Scott Black

* Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man? ~ Kenneth E. Boulding * With laissez-faire and price atomic, Ecology's Uneconomic, But with another kind of logic Economy's Unecologic. ~ Kenneth E. Boulding

The number of people displaced by dams is estimated at between 40 million and 80 million, most of them in China and India. The costs of dams were on average 50% above their original estimate. Some designed to reduce flooding made it worse, and there were many unexpected environmental disadvantages, including the extinction of fish and bird species. Half the world's wetlands had been lost because of dams.
-- Paul Brown

* A diverse ecosystem will also be resilient, because it contains many species with overlapping ecological functions that can partially replace one another. When a particular species is destroyed by a severe disturbance so that a link in the network is broken, a diverse community will be able to survive and reorganize itself... In other words, the more complex the network is, the more complex its pattern of interconnections, the more resilient it will be. -- Fritjof Capra

* "There is something fundamentally wrong with treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation." ~ Herman Daly

* When I was very young, biology, the diversity of life, was one of my main interests. I know there's this image people have that I'm this spoiled, cocky punk of an actor. Honestly, that's not who I am. I really care that so many species have been wiped out, like genocide of entire races. I believe in the divine right of all species to survive on this planet. So I decided I want to be active as an environmentalist. I learned. I asked experts. I got active. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio

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

* Scientists know we must protect species because they are working parts of our life-support system. -- Paul Ehrlich

Biodiversity is the greatest treasure we have... Its diminishment is to be prevented at all cost.
- Thomas Eisner

BIODIVERSITY QUOTES

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Biodiversity Day - May 22