Diane Ackerman Quotes

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

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

Biological diversity is messy. It walks, it crawls, it swims, it swoops, it buzzes. But extinction is silent, and it has no voice other than our own.

Sumatra has these lush forests and huge, amazing creatures like elephants, orangutans, and tigers. They're disappearing because of industry coming in and cutting down the forests.

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

I want to interpret the natural world and our links to it. It's driven by the belief of many world-class scientists that we're in the midst of an extinction crisis... This time it's us that's doing it.

We live on a finite planet. We have finite resources, and we're running out of good, arable land.

Natural capital is easy to overlook because it is the pond we swim in. One can live perfectly well without ever giving a thought to the sulfur cycle or wetland functions. Only when the benefits nature provides are disrupted do we take notice.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.

We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we've smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don't think it's our privilege to behave this way.

Human civilization has been changing the Earth's environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.

Basically, I think 21st century conservation is moving toward preserving ecosystems by dealing with the needs of people.

The great task for environmental historians is to record and analyze the effects of man's recently achieved control over the natural world. What is needed is a longer-term global, comparative, historical perspective that treats the environment as a meaningful variable.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

As a nation we have not yet come to have a proper respect for the forest and to regard it as an indispensable part of our resources—one which is easily destroyed but difficult to replace; one which confers great benefits while it endures, but whose disappearance is accompanied by a train of evil consequences not readily foreseen and positively irreparable.

Some environmentalists demands are counter productive. Avoiding pesticides for example means farming more land less efficiently, which leads to higher prices, more hunger, more disease …, and less biodiversity.

You cannot, for instance, sustainably protect the environment if the majority of the people are still in primitive agriculture leading to the encroachment of forest reserves.

Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain.

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

During the Holocene, we undoubtedly altered our environment significantly, clearing land, diverting water and building great cities.

We're being challenged to do something so profound, it's unprecedented in the history of our species, and there couldn't be more at stake. It's not even our species at stake; it's the whole dream of life on earth that's taken 4.5 billion years to realize - all this beautiful pastoral life on earth.

Since the beginning of civilization humans have altered our environment and its biology to allow our civilization to thrive - from domesticating plants and animals to building shelter and tools from living organisms.

We are putting value in the things that really are not valuable, things like commodities or disposable stuff that can bought, but the rainforest has been undervalued, because the value shouldn't be in the trees that you take out; it's should be with leaving the trees to preserve the life system that sustains life on the planet.

The most striking thing to me about human space flight and my own personal experience is that I've seen dramatic changes on Earth. We humans are rapidly changing the planet. I've watched Amazonia as the rainforest has been cut down. That's something I've seen out the window. I'm very worried about that.