Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

Endangered species are our friends.

As a young boy, I was obsessed with endangered species and the extinct species that men killed off. Biology was the subject in school that I was incredibly passionate about.

I've always liked trees. And then, growing up, I took an interest in ecology, hedges being destroyed, the landscape being turned into prairies.

Since I was a kid, I inherited my dad's love for animals and wildlife, even for the ones we had around the house in the French countryside, a 'smaller' kind of nature. Then, as I grew up, I looked more deeply into the African continent and its wildlife.

To many people, 'biodiversity' is almost synonymous with the word 'nature,' and 'nature' brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.

Biological diversity is messy. It walks, it crawls, it swims, it swoops, it buzzes. But extinction is silent, and it has no voice other than our own.

Most people know that forests are the lungs of our planet, literally playing a critical role in every breath we take. And that they're also home to incredible animals like the orangutan and elephant, which will go extinct if we keep cutting down their forests.

Ultimately we need to recognize that while humans continue to build urban landscapes, we share these spaces with others species.

One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.

All I want to do is to present the abundance of life on Earth.

Nature is so phenomenal.

Save the elephants, and then you save the forest - and then you save yourself.

Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere.

Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.

It's fair to say when you go out and walk in the woods or on a beach, the most conspicuous forms of life you will see are plants and animals, and certainly there's a huge diversity of those types of organisms, perhaps 10 million animal species and several hundred thousand plant species.

Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we'll soon be in trouble.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

I'm interested in raw land and trees and fresh air and rivers and lots of animals around them.

I'd like more of the world go back to being wild.

In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.

Brazil has one of the greatest natural patrimonies in terms of biodiversity.

The most important principle of environment is that you are not the only element.

No species is more important than others.

Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.

It is odd that we have so little relationship with nature, with the insects and the leaping frog and the owl that hoots among the hills calling for its mate. We never seem to have a feeling for all living things on the earth.