#conservation

Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrially raised chickens poisons the Chesapeake; the Amazon has been slashed and burned for soy--and don't even mention seafood. To this bunch of herpetologists, the sin of ordering shrimp lay in the bycatch--young fish, and especially sea turtles, caught in the nets and discarded, dead or dying. ↗

— Joe Roman

#food #food

Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation. ↗

— Bill McKibben

#environmentalism #humility #woods #environmentalism

I have long been active in and supportive of conservation and historical preservation causes. ↗

— Jack L. Chalker

#been #causes #conservation #historical #i

This is how social change ultimately happens: enlightened values do not change behavior; the contours of self-interest are altered and new values rush into the vacuum. ↗

— William Powers

#conservation #values #change

The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture. ↗

— Gaylord Nelson

#culture #environmental #environmental issue #ethic #important

Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed? ↗

— Solomon Short

#another #conservation #energy #fittest #hero

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. ↗

— Gary Snyder

#home #nature #nature

Our inability to think beyond our own species, or to be able to co-habit with other life forms in what is patently a massive collaborative quest for survival, is surely a malady that pervades the human soul. ↗

— Lawrence Anthony

#environmental #environmentalism #species #wilderness #life

Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints! ↗

— Chief Seattle

#conservation #nature #quote #nature

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. ↗

— Carl Safina

#ecology #nature #pro-choice #pro-life #life