conservation challenges Quotes

We cannot protect everything, all of the time.

If you manage to stop the timber industry from cutting this forest, they'll cut that forest. If you stop oil drilling here, they'll go drill there.

No one knows the diversity in the world, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. ... We don't know for sure how many species there are, where they can be found or how fast they're disappearing. It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. Save a priceless woodland or an irreplaceable mountain today, and tomorrow it is threatened from another quarter.

Sometimes I wonder whether anything is learned in conservation, or whether the big NGOs are for ever destined to follow a circular track, endlessly repeating their mistakes.

Without the support of local people, you might as well give up because you can make all the noise you like, you can demarcate a national park, but if the people outside want to go creeping into a forest you really can't stop them. They've got to get a benefit.

The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters... and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult.

The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal battle between right and wrong.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.

Wildlife film-makers I know tell me that the effort to portray what looks like an untouched ecosystem becomes harder every year. They have to choose their camera angles ever more carefully to exclude the evidence of destruction, travel further to find the Edens they depict.

Conservation’s grand challenge is to save nature in a world that will soon have 9 billion hungry, thirsty, energy-using people.

If you're not willing to take the political heat, then you shouldn't get into the game of land conservation, especially on a large scale.

It's relatively easy to generate a lot of enthusiasm for Puget Sound in the short term. Sustaining the effort to clean it up is somewhat tougher.

Many locals in east Africa are calling for fences to separate wildlife and people. They argue it will reduce conflict and also make it easier to protect the wildlife from poachers. From my experience in Tanzania, no fence and no militia will hold back the tide of poachers drawn by the huge sums of money at stake.

Take the crocodile, for example, my favorite animal. There are 23 species. Seventeen of those species are rare or endangered. They're on the way out, no matter what anyone does or says, you know.

I am asserting that those who love the wilderness should not be wholly deprived of it, that while the reduction of the wilderness has been a good thing, its extermination would be a very bad one, and that the conservation of wilderness is the most urgent and difficult of all the tasks that confront us, because there are no economic laws to help and many to hinder its accomplishment.

But private lands development around the periphery of the parks - Grand Teton and Yellowstone - is a crucial issue because if those private lands are transformed from open pastures, meadow, forest land to suburbs, to little ranchettes, to shopping malls, to roads, to Starbucks - if those places are all settled for the benefit of humans, then the elk are not going to be able to migrate in and out of Yellowstone Park anymore. And if the elk can't migrate into the park, then that creates problems for the wolves, for the grizzlies, for a lot of other creatures.

In the environmental movement, every time you lose a battle it's for good, but our victories always seem to be temporary and we keep fighting them over and over again.

The problem is that during the 1980s, a decade of heavy poaching, the elephants retreated to safer areas. And now people have moved into the corridors once used by the elephants.

Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow.

The vast majority of species that are vanishing, we haven't even discovered yet. How can you possibly put them back in nature if the ecosystem is gone?

The challenge of weaning ourselves off fossil fuel even as it becomes more abundant will make the old fights about energy conservation seem like child's play.