E. O. Wilson Quotes

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.

As to the Amazon itself, the transition from conservation to sustainable development was a huge awakening since conservation was a western concept and strategy to encourage the developing world to protect biodiversity resources for the sake of future generations and the wellbeing of the planet.

We need a philosophy for humans and nature to live together.

We protect nature not for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities.

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

We have a very old conservation movement, particularly in the United States, which has focused on campaigns to protect endangered species: the spotted owl, the old-growth forest. But usually it stops there. To me, biodiversity is the full spectrum. Species conservation is not only about wilderness conservation. It’s also about protecting the livelihood of people even while changing the dominant relationship that humans have had with other species. In India, it’s an economic issue, not just an ecological one.

Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.

Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.

I think that the environmental movement is wisely moving away from a largely emotion-based argument for the spiritual or intrinsic value of Nature with a capital "N" and evolving toward a very hard-nosed case for the economic value of natural capital, ecosystem services, biodiversity, etc.

By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

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

What we've proven is that you can protect the environment, use it wisely and grow the economy and that there is no conflict between the two.

I think that our cooperative conservation approaches get people to sit down and grapple with problem solving.

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

We learned that economic growth and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand.

We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.

'The Creation' presents an argument for saving biological diversity on Earth. Most of the book is for as broad an audience as possible.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics..

EPA's role is even broader than water infrastructure and cleaning up contaminated land - the agency also has a key role in allowing projects to move forward by reviewing environmental impact statements during the permitting process.

The value of biodiversity is that it makes our ecosystems more resilient, which is a prerequisite for stable societies; its wanton destruction is akin to setting fire to our lifeboat.

It would be a mistake to believe that environmental protection and economic growth are mutually exclusive.

If we don't get sustainability right in agriculture first, it won't happen anywhere.

Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.

Facts have proved that prosperity at the expense of the environment is only delaying disaster. We cannot passively protect our environment by simply stopping economic development.