Whooping Crane Quotes (3 quotes)
In our concern for the whooping crane we are at once symbolizing and concealing a far deeper anxiety—namely, the prospective total extermination of all species.
In My Works and Days: A Personal Chronicle (1979), 452.
The real problem is not the loss of a particular species but the loss of particular kinds of environments. … When you lose a big, dramatic species like the whooping crane, you don’t notice that you are also losing other plants and animals. … We are only putting Band-Aids on until we recognize we need to be protecting environments, not just endangered species.
In Philip Shabecoff, 'Further Safeguards Urged For Endangered Species', New York Times (14 Mar 1985), B9. Attenborough was in America to testify before a Congressional subcommittee considering the reauthorization of the Endangered Species Act (originally passed in 1973).
There is a curious illusion today that nature is both wise and good. The awful truth is that nature is a bitch from the human point of view I care about the whooping crane a little. I would even give $10 to save the whooping crane. The whooping crane doesn’t give a damn about me.
From paper presented at Laramie College of Commerce and Industry, University of Wyoming, 'Energy and the Environment' (Jan 1976), 12, as quoted in Kenneth Ewart Boulding and Richard P. Beilock (ed.), Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms (1980, 2009), 153.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
