Extinction Risk Quotes

People are beginning to realize that we need to live in accordance with the law of ecology, the law of finite resources, and if we don't, we're going to go extinct.

The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.

I don't think college wrestling is in danger of extinction by any means. But I am concerned if one program drops.

The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing. Therefore, the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there's going to be an extinction event.

If you think about it, every single species is endangered. Homo sapiens at the front of the line, mosquitoes and lawyers at the back.

Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.

Our climate is changing. The Earth's climate has, in fact, warmed by 1.1 to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit since the industrial revolution. People look at this and say: Oh, that is not very much. In fact, it is very much, and it changes the dynamic. It impacts species. It kills some. It diminishes the carbon sink of the ocean. It does a number of things.

By far the single greatest danger facing humankind - in fact, all living beings on our planet - is the threat of nuclear destruction.

Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential.

Our evolution could have gone in different directions a lot of times. We could have gone extinct at some points. We might not have gotten our big brains, or Neanderthals might have made it while we did not.

For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty - statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

On an overcrowded planet where more species slip toward extinction every day, should one species have the right to multiply and consume at will, even as it nudges others to oblivion?

I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.

Human extinction in our children's lifetime, it should be your top news item every single day, what's happening, you should be holding politicians to account.

When I am at a dinner table, I love to ask everybody, 'How long do you think our species might last?' I've read that the average age of a species, of any species, is about two million years. Is it possible we can have an average life span as a species? And do you picture us two million years more or a million and a half years, or 5,000?

All of the great whales are endangered.

Some will criticize the Green New Deal for being too bold or being unmanageable. I tell you what, I haven't seen anything better that addresses this singular crisis we face, a crisis that could, at its worst, lead to extinction. The Green New Deal does that. It ties it to the economy and acknowledges that all of the things are interconnected.

As long as we are a single-planet species, we are vulnerable to extinction by a planetwide catastrophe, natural or self-induced. Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.

The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century.

If mountain gorillas are to survive and propagate, far more active conservation measures urgently need to be undertaken. The question remains, is it already too late?

Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There's no doubt in my heart.

The very fact that the jaguar can become extinct while the Pekingese survives indicates to me that someone hasn't thought this thing through.

The kakapo is a bird out of time. If you look one in its large, round, greeny-brown face, it has a look of serenely innocent incomprehension that makes you want to hug it and tell it that everything will be all right, thought you know that it probably will not be.

I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.