John Burnside Quotes

Without butterflies, the world would soon have few flowers. There is enough room in the sky for all flyers.

If man doesn't learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct.

An image of the Earth, its landscapes, directly affects people. The beauty of the Earth creates enormous emotion, and through that emotion, you can transmit knowledge and raise consciousness.

… human population growth within the ecosystem was closely analogous to the growth of malignant tumor cells within an organism: that man was acting like a cancer on the biosphere. The multiplication of human numbers certainly seems wild and uncontrolled... Four million a month - the equivalent of the population of Chicago... We seem to be doing all right at the moment; but if you could ask cancer cells, I suspect they would think they were doing fine. But when the organism dies, so do they; and for our own, selfish, practical, utilitarian reasons, I think we should be careful about how we influence the rest of the ecosystem.

For the most part we don’t have an immediate impact on the species that surrounds us. But we do have an immediate impact on their habitat which determines whether they survive on in some cases shift their ground.

Biodiversity underpins life on earth. And if we don't look after this biodiversity, if we don't protect it, if we don't actually harness it in the right way, we are threatening our own livelihoods on this planet.

We are in grave danger of losing forever not just millions of years of evolution on earth, but the eons of change that have produced man and his natural environment.

Predators, they're the best coal miners' canary. When they're gone, you've got a sick ecosystem.

One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.

Birds and insects are part of the ecosystem and help in pollination. I don't see any problem in having fruits and vegetables that birds want to eat, as opposed to the perfect shaped tomato that only you can eat and which, by the way, could also be cancerous.

I have a huge belief in the importance of bees, not just for their honey, which is a healing and delicious food, but the necessity of bee colonies that are vital to the health of the planet.

The big goal - and it sounds crazy - is to save as much life on Earth as possible.

So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months.

To deal with these problems - of world population and hunger, of peace, of energy and mineral resources, of environmental pollution, of poverty - we must broaden and deepen our knowledge of nature's laws, and we must broaden and deepen our understanding of the laws of human behavior.

The environment, what surrounds you, is so alive and delightful and complex.

The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans.

You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus.

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

Fortunately, nature is as generous with its problems as Nobel with his fortune. The more we know, the more aware we are of what we know not.

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.

We must recognize that we're all part of a web of life around the world. Anytime you extinguish a species, the consequences are serious.

For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us - the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small - to flourish.

So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us. Because the planet doesn't need to be saved. It doesn't care if all the squirrels, elephants, and trees die and there's just a couple of amoebas floating around at the poles.

In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.