Rob Thurman Quotes

The good news is that real-world hands-on conservation is alive and well and catching on across the America I travel.

National Parks are the gold standard for conservation.

That's what the best global conservation organisations and the American government (and other environmentally inclined governments, such as Sweden and the Netherlands) are doing: protecting the remaining wild environment. This is the equivalent of getting a patient to the emergency room - keep them alive and then figure out how to save them.

I believe in helping the planet survive, and that includes reaching out to help some of the disappearing creatures whose habitats we're destroying. It's up to us to somehow reverse that trend. I don't know how we'll achieve it, but we need to.

I realize the answer is not to create wilderness and walk away.

I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.

True conservation means protecting the entire habitat.

Mississippians for the most part appreciate U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service management of our wildlife refuges and other natural resources.

Like environmentalists, politicians generally privilege flora and fauna over folks. (NIMBYs excepted. Senator Edward Kennedy is a not-in-my-backyard environmentalist: he opposes wind farms in Nantucket Sound, offshore from his Hyannis Port compound.)

This is the way federal land management should work. Cooperation, not confrontation, should be the hallmark of conservation efforts.

People habitat has to take priority over bird habitat.

India's elite wants not just cosmetic environmentalism, but a consumer-environmentalism. It wants to have good areas to go for tourism to. So it's happy to have national parks, because people can go for wildlife tourism. Or good beaches. But they don't want, and don't care about, a livelihood environmentalism.

My job, my mission, what I have been put on this planet for is to save wildlife.

Conservation is not without its critics and opposition. There are a lot of special interests that don't want to see land set aside.

We must be vigilant in protecting Nevada's outdoor heritage and make this a top priority.

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

We can see the weather change, that the birds don't come to the city anymore... we seriously have to think about preserving nature.

The struggle to save every possible species and ecosystem from the current wave of destruction is worthwhile. One day, perhaps within our lifetimes, they could repopulate a thriving world.

The byproduct of the main thrust to protect the biodiversity of a given place is that you get especially young people out to the parks, because it will be future generations that will have to value these landscapes and these ecosystems and make sure that nobody is changing the law.

Part of what makes South Carolina so beautiful is the land we conserve for wildlife and for future generations.

Cherish your wilderness.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow. Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, science or for wildlife, but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible. It follows, then, that any wilderness program is a rearguard action, through which retreats are reduced to a minimum.

The preservation of biodiversity is not just a job for governments. International and non-governmental organisations, the private sector and each and every individual have a role to play in changing entrenched outlooks and ending destructive patterns of behaviour

We have to create a sustainable environment, worldwide, and we're not doing it. The best thing we can do with the rest of this century is aggressively acquire - and put aside - the richest natural reserves that we can, and then do our best to manage the needs and desires of the 11 billion people we expect to have by the end of the century. This is where biology is headed. For that reason, the sooner we get on with mapping biodiversity on Earth, the better off biology will be - not to mention the whole subject of saving it before we carelessly throw it away.

Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation.