Keith Henson Quotes

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.

I seldom go into a natural history museum without feeling as if I were attending a funeral.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

If you think about it, every single species is endangered. Homo sapiens at the front of the line, mosquitoes and lawyers at the back.

The whale is endangered, while the ant continues to do just fine.

What happens if you are the last (the very, very last) of your species, and you die - and humans notice? We live, increasingly, at a time when extinctions are recorded, remembered, and the last animal (or plant) in its line, by virtue of its being last, becomes a kind of celebrity. Its finality becomes a thing to honor.

Extinction was a difficult concept for a 10-year-old.

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.

Chimpanzees are endangered. Severely.

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.

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

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

The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.

We'll all die out eventually. Humans will be gone. And all I'm saying is, when people worry about polar bears disappearing or whatever, it's like, 'Well that's life, things will come and go, we'll find new species.'

No more wolves, wilderness or welfare.

Extinction is forever!

Nature is nobody's ally.

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.

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.

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.

Sumatra has these lush forests and huge, amazing creatures like elephants, orangutans, and tigers. They're disappearing because of industry coming in and cutting down the forests.

Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The snow leopard is absolutely magnificent. It represents really what endangered species are all about.

The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.