Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

Many of the earth's habitats, animals, plants, insects and even micro-organisms that we know to be rare may not be known at all by future generations. We have the capability and the responsibility to act; we must do so before it is too late.

On an overcrowded planet where more species slip toward extinction every day, should one species have the right to multiply and consume at will, even as it nudges others to oblivion?

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.

We must recognize that we're all part of a web of life around the world. Anytime you extinguish a species, the consequences are serious.

As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves.

Ignorance, hatred and greed are killing nature.

I want to interpret the natural world and our links to it. It's driven by the belief of many world-class scientists that we're in the midst of an extinction crisis... This time it's us that's doing it.

Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are 'chosen', the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.

We, Homo sapiens, destroyed the majority of the large mammalian species in North America and Australasia just over 10,000 years ago. We, Homo sapiens, now are destroying the other species that presently exist on this planet at a rate of about 15,000 to 20,000 per year.

We see evidence that lakes and forests and wetlands can have different equilibria - so you have a savanna system that may be stable and thriving, but it can also tip over and become an arid steppe if pushed too far by warming, land degradation, and biodiversity loss.

People will be able to survive, of course, without honeycreepers and monk seals. But if the wolf spider is in trouble, we are in trouble, too.

Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can't say, 'Is it too late?' That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it's too late, you don't need to act; if it's not too late, you don't need to act.

The idea that we're somehow centrally important to the planet's existence is pretty comical - although I'd like us to be.

The Anthropocentic Age - the first age in which humankind is the dominant species on the planet - cuts both ways: it is up to us to destroy or save the planet. We certainly have the ability.

Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning the library without ever having read its books.

I was so fanatical about trying to save wildlife... I was unable to accept that we couldn't solve this problem of thousands of years, of wherever humans operated, the environment deteriorated.

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.

We are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature... In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the Earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.

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.

We'll lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than we've lost in the last 65 million years. If we don't find answers to these problems, we're gonna be victims of this extinction event that we're at fault for.

There's money to be made by driving a species extinct.

Within only 2,000 years of humanity’s arrival in the New World, indigenous peoples drove to extinction 84 of the 107 genera of large mammals – all before the invention of the wheel, writing or iron tools.

The irreversible loss of species, which by 2100 may reach one-third of all species now living, is especially serious. We are losing the potential they hold for providing medicinal and other benefits, and the contribution that genetic diversity of life forms gives to the robustness of the world's biological systems and to the astonishing beauty of the earth itself. Much of this damage is irreversible on a scale of centuries, or permanent. Other processes appear to pose additional threats. Increasing levels of gases in the atmosphere from human activities, including carbon dioxide released from fossil fuel burning and from deforestation, may alter climate on a global scale. Predictions of global warming are still uncertain—with projected effects ranging from tolerable to very severe—but the potential risks are very great.