Conservation Failure Quotes

If government ownership of land and natural resources was the best way to protect the environment, then we should have found a Garden of Eden in the Soviet Union after the Iron Curtain came down. Instead, there was one environmental horror story after another.

The sad thing about destroying the environment is that we're going to take the rest of life with us. The bluebirds will be gone, and the elephants will be gone, and the tigers will be gone, and the pandas will be gone.

Conservation programs are great but when you’ve already done all the conservation and you got no water, how does that help you? It doesn’t. The only thing that could help us now, is water.

The mountain gorilla faces grave danger of extinction - primarily because of the encroachments of native man upon its habitat - and neglect by civilized man, who does not conscientiously protect even the limited areas now allotted for the gorilla's survival.

It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet.

I must stress, basically, the very fact that we do have orangutan rehabilitation means that we have failed to do what is really important, and that is rescue the wild orangutan in its habitat.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

We Americans, in most states at least, have not yet experienced a bear-less, eagle-less, cat- less, wolf-less woods. Germany strove for maximum yields of both timber and game and got neither.

We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation.

Conservation is now a dead word.

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

We stand guard over works of art, but species representing the work of aeons are stolen from under our noses

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.

We develop our beautiful planet in such a way that we brush aside the species... we risk creating a wasteland, where our aspirations will ultimately wither and die

I believe it's our loss of connection with our instinctual side that prevents us from being effective pack leaders for our dogs. Perhaps it's also why we also seem to be failing at being positive guardians of our planet.

We're losing a species every few seconds. We cannot put them back. If we change our mind and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake' - it's too late. This is the world we live with.

You can't save the rhinos and you can't preserve a culture. I'm very pessimistic. Once it's gone, it's over.

The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world.

I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.

We still have the illusion that the ocean will recover. That even if we do have to lose sharks, people don't understand why this matters. The evidence is in front of us, and we fail to take it in and say, "Now I get it. Now I understand."

Wildlife of the world is disappearing, not because of a malicious and deliberate policy of slaughter and extermination, but simply because of a general and widespread ignorance and neglect.