Endangered Species Quotes (6 quotes)
[My work as a photographer is a] mission to document endangered species and landscapes in order to show a world worth saving.
On the 'About' page of his web site.
If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren’t looking.
Conclusion from article 'The Grizzly—A Problem in Land Planning', in Outdoor America (6 Apr 1942), 7, 12.
If you want to see an endangered species, get up and look in the mirror.
As quoted on the nmspacemuseum.org website of the New Mexico Museum of Space History.
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).
Why do they prefer to tell stories about the possible medicinal benefits of the Houston toad rather than to offer moral reasons for supporting the Endangered Species Act? That law is plainly ideological; it is hardly to be excused on economic grounds.
…...
Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism?
In The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and what We Eat (2004), 189.
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) -- 
