Species Decline Quotes

At independence, Tanzania had 350,000 elephants... in 1987, there were only 55,000 elephants left.

When biological technology becomes further advanced, human beings as we know them, will become a modified species. If we as human beings fail to include the possibility of this development in our overall, social evolution we will witness the decline of our species

The Ruffed Pandanga of Borneo and Rotherham spreads out his feathers in his courtship dance and imitates Winston Churchill and Tommy Cooper on one leg. The padanga is dying out because the female padanga doesn't take it too seriously.

For two summers not a blue wing, not a blue warble. I seemed to miss something kindred and precious from my environment--the visible embodiment of the tender sky and wistful soil. What a loss, I said, to coming generations of dwellers in the country--no bluebird in spring!

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

We are a species that has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look, and listen.

An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare. So you don't lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. Therefore, they're not perceived as a big loss.

About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.

The only biodiversity we're going to have left is Coke versus Pepsi. We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.

We are living in the most destructive and, hence, the most stupid period of the history of our species.

Our planet has not seen an extinction crisis as serious as the one in progress for 65 million years.

Australia has one of the worst mammalian extinction rates in the world.

It's the next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause

You look at the fact that for millions of years species on earth have been developing and we've been knocking them off at like a hundred a day.

When not protected by law, by popular favor or superstition, or by other special circumstances, [birds] yield very readily to the influences of civilization, and, though the first operations of the settler are favorable to the increase of many species, the great extension of rural and of mechanical industry is, in a variety of ways, destructive even to tribes not directly warred upon by man.

To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway.

Few people younger than me know that it was once normal to see fields white with mushrooms, or rivers black with eels at the autumn equinox, or that every patch of nettles was once reamed by caterpillars.

The Endangered Species Act is the strongest and most effective tool we have to repair the environmental harm that is causing a species to decline.

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.

What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?

The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs.

It's a fair guess that at the rate we're destroying habitat, especially but not exclusively in the tropics, we're pushing to extinction about one species every hour. That doesn't count the species whose populations are being reduced so greatly that diversity within the population is essentially gone.

I am truly sorry that a fowl of Canada is no longer with us.