Quotes About Species Extinction

#1. Overpopulation in the United States will become THE single greatest issue facing Americans in the 21st century. We either solve it proactively or nature will solve it brutally for us via water shortages, energy crisis, air pollution, gridlock, species extinction and worse.

Frosty Wooldridge

#2. We're handing them [young people & future generations] a climate system which is potentially out of their control. We're in an emergency: you can see what's on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction

James Hansen

#3. I'm not saying we don't have our set of problems - climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage - we surely do. [But] ultimately we knock them down.

Peter Diamandis

#4. Struggle was the explanation behind all the most troubling biological mysteries: species differentiation, species extinction, and species transmutation. Struggle explained everything

Elizabeth Gilbert

#5. Shelters, conservationists, those concerned about unnecessary cruelty toward the animals we eat, and people working against species extinction fight to preserve the true riches of our planet, our real inheritance. These are big, critical goals.

April Gornik

#6. An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.

Rusty Schweickart

#7. One in eight plant species face extinction.

David Attenborough

#8. If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#9. As long as we are a single-planet species, we are vulnerable to extinction by a planetwide catastrophe, natural or self-induced. Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.

David Grinspoon

#10. one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is

David Mitchell

#11. I have spent hours and hours watching elephants, and to come to understand what emotional creatures they are...it's not just a species facing extinction, it's massive individual suffering.

Mike Bond

#12. Extinction catches Man by surprise because no one can even imagine that such a catastrophe can happen to an intelligent species.

Bill Gaede

#13. 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.

John Steinbeck

#14. I will murder you by the billions to give you immortality. I will set fire to your civilization to light your way forward. But know this: My species is not defined by your dying, but by your living.

Daniel H. Wilson

#15. Don't believe what you hear about those penguins. A species of lazy waddlers. Their extinction is immanent.

Benson Bruno

#16. Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.

Stephen Jay Gould

#17. If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.

Edward O. Wilson

#18. Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential.

Ernst Mayr

#19. 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?

Thomas French

#20. I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.

Asa Gray

#21. A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.

David Quammen

#22. The fate of hundreds of thousands of species on this planet may be decided in the next decade. To slow the rush to extinction, we need to achieve real, substantive political power, and we need to get there fast.

Eban Goodstein

#23. Besides, take away self-interest and you condemn the species to extinction, that's my motto!

X

#24. The extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on Earth - social and environmental.

Ingrid Newkirk

#25. The diversity of life on Earth, generally, is astonishing. But despite those large numbers, it's also important to recognize that every species, one way or another, is vulnerable to extinction. And in our time on Earth our impact on the diversity of life has been profound.

Sylvia Earle

#26. The destiny of all species is extinction as such, fortunately for them.

T.H. White

#27. A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#28. I think we must ask ourselves if this is really what we want to do to God's creation, to drive it to extinction? Because extinction really is irreversible; species that go extinct are lost forever. This is not like Jurassic Park. We can't bring them back.

Stuart L. Pimm

#29. Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don't. We don't eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.

J. Budziszewski

#30. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate.

Bill Nye

#31. If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.

James Hansen

#32. The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but one weedy species.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#33. Every day on this planet some species that doesn't draw the attention of humans goes extinct.

Liu Cixin

#34. Few problems are less recognized, but more important than, the accelerating disappearance of the earth's biological resources. In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it is perched.

Paul R. Ehrlich

#35. If enough species are extinguished, will the ecosystems collapse, and will the extinction of most other species follow soon afterward? The only answer anyone can give is: possibly. By the time we find out, however, it might be too late. One planet, one experiment.

E. O. Wilson

#36. Land bridges were everywhere during the extinction, many species were spreading, and there were many diseases.

Robert T. Bakker

#37. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself.

Yuval Noah Harari

#38. We'll lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than we've lost in the last 65 million years. If we don't find answers to these problems, we're gonna be victims of this extinction event that we're at fault for.

Paul Watson

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

Brian D. McLaren

#40. With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.

Kate Bernheimer

#41. And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed "unintentionally" in seafood production.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#42. It is a fact that the ecological devastation of the planet can be traced to the consumption of meat and dairy, which contributes to water, soil, and air pollution as well as global warming and the mass extinction of many species of plant and animal forms.

Sharon Gannon

#43. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

David Mitchell

#44. Is this how it is for a species that senses it is going extinct? Is there a feeling of loneliness, or unease, each morning, upon awakening?

Rick Bass

#45. You're hurt, she commented. And I care? Okay. It's official. I'm my own species now: pathetic-deathwish-osaurus ... I sooo hear extinction calling me.

Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

#46. I've accepted the fact that there's a beginning and end to everything. All species are born, evolve, and then die off. We're going through the 6th great extinction and the large mammals are going first and, you know what - we're large mammals!

Yvon Chouinard

#47. The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives, homes and businesses lost, ecosystems destroyed, species driven to extinction, infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced.

David Suzuki

#48. The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

Thomas Huxley

#49. Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

Charles Darwin

#50. Would you kill half the population today in order to save our species from extinction?

Dan Brown

#51. His interest, after all, was not in the origin of species but in their demise.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#52. We torture and kill two billion sentient living beings every week. 10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one, and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction in cosmological history. If any other organism did this, a biologist would consider them a virus.

Philip Wollen

#53. He sat there thinking of Man's capacity for the wiping out of species
sometimes in hate or fear, at other times for the simple love of gain.

Clifford D. Simak

#54. This is the moment when we have to decide: does a world exist outside ourselves and is that world worth fighting for? Another 200 species went extinct today. They were my kin. They were yours, too. If we know them as such, why aren't we fighting to save them with everything we've got?

Lierre Keith

#55. Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up.

The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

John N. Gray

#56. A species may eat a particular bacterium, phytoplankton, smaller fish, or plant in an area. Lacking a predator, these species/populations will overgrow and alter the area's biology, overwhelming and driving to extinction dozens or hundreds or thousands of other local species.

Thom Hartmann

#57. Extinction, the irrevocable loss of a species, causes pain that can never find relief. It is an ache that will pass from generation to generation for the rest of human history.

Callum Roberts