Wildlife Loss Quotes

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

Tropical rain forests, as well as tropical and temperate dry forests, are being destroyed rapidly. At present rates, some critical forest types will be gone in a few years, and most of the tropical rain forest will be gone before the end of the next century. With them will go large numbers of plant and animal species.

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them

The people of each generation perceive the state of the ecosystems they encountered in their childhood as normal and natural. When wildlife is depleted, we might notice the loss, but we are unaware that the baseline by which we judge the decline is in fact a state of extreme depletion.

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!

Our planet is dying. Whales will be extinct before we ever get to know them. They say these creatures are so intelligent. They may disappear from the face of the Earth before we know them, and that is a great tragedy.

To drown a river beneath its own impounded water, by damming, is to kill what it was and to settle for something else. When the damming happens without good reason . . . then it's a tragedy of diminishment for the whole planet, a loss of one more wild thing, leaving Earth just a little flatter and tamer and simpler and uglier than before.

Without elephants, Africa's landscape would be unrecognizable, yet these animals have fallen by the hundreds of thousands as a result of two enormous waves of poaching in this century - one in the 1970s and 1980s, the other, beginning around 2009, now underway.

It takes a true encounter to realise that real animals, wild animals, have all but passed from our lives.

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.

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.

The scary thing is that in my lifetime, 95 per cent of the world's rhinos have been killed.

It is upsetting that many people don't seem to observe what's happening to the environment, what's happening in terms of global warming, the loss of habitats and wild things.

[My] excursions provided a unique opportunity for observing [the gorillas' behavior] in their natural habitat... Then, all too soon, the infants were demanded for their trip to the zoo. ... [H]appily the babies did not know they would never see their mountain home again

All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization.

For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.

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

Food production is ripping the living world apart. Fishing and farming are, by a long way, the greatest cause of extinction and loss of the diversity and abundance of wildlife. Farming is a major cause of climate breakdown, the biggest cause of river pollution and a hefty source of air pollution.

Where do we record the passing of wildlife? Who mourns the silent deaths of the small?

When I consider that the noble animals have been exterminated here - the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc, etc - I cannot but feel as I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country.

Some eco groups suggest that as many as 73 million sharks are killed globally every year. Hammerheads, blue sharks, mako sharks - they're disappearing, and they ain't coming back.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

This world without a leopard…I mean, who would want to be here?!

Almost all these hotspots around the world, most have been destroyed to the point where there is no wildlife and very little of the natural world left.

Short-sighted men who in their greed and selfishness will, if permitted, rob our country of half its charm by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things.