154 Quotes About Extinction

if we designed our buildings the way we design our gardens, with only aesthetics in mind, they would fall down.

Humans, ironically, had a strange fascination with preserving the wildlife of their day. While they were busy changing the very atmosphere and seas, cutting and burning away swaths of forest and jungle to build cities and farms, they somehow felt better about all their damage by making sure species on the cusp of extinction still had a place in the world—even if they were really just a dead clade walking.

If you care about our living planet, it's time to take part in bringing awareness to our climate and extinction crisis.

...if human numbers increase, the rate of infection also increases.

We are both gods and fools.

We’ve got to hope that somehow it’s all going to come together,” Paul Crump, a herpetologist from the Houston Zoo who was directing the stalled waterfall project, told me. “We’ve got to hope that something will happen, and we’ll be able to piece it all together, and it will all be as it once was, which now that I say it out loud sounds kind of stupid.

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

And that is what Mauritius is most famous for: the extinction of the dodo.

the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they’re put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.