Bob Greene Quotes

The diversity of life is so stimulating for me.

The living world is not a single array... connected by unbroken series of intergrades.

Nature is not a partisan, but out of her ample treasue house she produces children in infinite variety, of which she is equally the mother, and disowns none of them.

A single tree in the tropical forest in the south of Mexico has more different species than some European countries.

There are some four million different kinds of animals and plants in the world. Four million different solutions to the problems of staying alive.

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.

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.

The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.

When you think about it, if the fittest always won, all forests should be completely homogeneous. One species should supplant all others as the most superior competitor. But it doesn't happen that way. Nor does it happen that way in the marketplace.

I love all of the ecosystems - mountains, deserts, rainforests. They're beautiful, and nature has so many different flavors to it.

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

The protection of biodiversity and, therefore, of endangered species is an issue to which I attach a great deal of importance.

Great attention gets paid to rainforests because of the diversity of life there. Diversity in the oceans is even greater.

Nature is to be found in her entirety nowhere more than in her smallest creatures.

The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. ... The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.

We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.

Publicly and among themselves biologists rightly celebrate the diversity of life on Earth... At the end of the day, however, their confession is heard by no one: they work with a single scientific sample-life on Earth.

Nature varies the seed according to the variety of the things she desires to produce in the world.

We will instead have to measure our economy by the health of the ecosystems and human communities where we do our work.

By one bait or another, Nature allures inhabitants into all her recesses.

Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable.

There is a massive ecosystem that has to get built that looks like a biosphere. And the various parts of that biosphere better be there.

You cannot tackle hunger, disease, and poverty unless you can also provide people with a healthy ecosystem in which their economies can grow.

Nature doesn't like empires. It doesn't like accumulation in one place, it doesn't like monoculture. It's always trying to make diverse species. It wants to spread everything out. And we're constantly trying to hold everything in.

Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so.