258 Quotes About Conservation

Left alone, the Florida panther would be remembered as a textbook exercise on how to go extinct while your abundant and vociferous advocates argue about the process.

For a century, environmentalism has divided itself into warring camps: conservationists versus preservationists.... The struggle pits those who would meddle with nature against those who would leave it be.... The only sensible way forward lies in a melding of the two philosophies. If nature has grown artificial, then restoring wilderness requires human intervention. We must manage nature in order to leave it alone.

Maybe we’ll live to see sharks recover. Right now, that seems as improbable as seeing all these falcons. Hope is the ability to see how things could be better. The world of human affairs has long been a shadowy place, but always backlit by the light of hope. Each person can add hope to the world. A resigned person subtracts hope. The more people strive, the more change becomes likely.

The skilled observer, not the machine, was the essence of conservation.

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.

I learned long ago that conservation has no victories, that one must retain connections and remain involved with animals and places that have captured the heart, to prevent their destruction. I am sometimes asked why, given a world that is more wounded and scarred, I do not simply give up, burdened by pessimism. But conservation is my life, I must retain hope

This is my manifesto. My attempt to nudge people toward something, or back toward something. Toward what? An understanding that most of us already have on a deeper level. That a world exists outside of us. A world that reminds us that we are animals, too, animals who have evolved along with other animals on this earth. Thinking, planning, scheming, talking, writing animals, but animals nonetheless.

We know that when we protect our oceans we're protecting our future.

If we kill off the wild, then we are killing a part of our souls.