"If the world can no longer afford the luxury of natural beauty, then it will soon be overcome and destroyed by its own ugliness. I myself feel deeply that the fate of man, and his dignity, are at stake whenever the earth's natural splendors are threatened with extinction. We are forever condemned to be part of a mystery that neither logic nor imagination can fathom, and your presence among us carries a resonance that cannot be accounted for in terms of science or reason, but only in terms of awe, wonder, and reverence. You are our last innocence." -- Romain Gary (1914-1980)
"All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all."
-- Cecil Frances Alexander, (1818-1895)
"For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has non advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity." -- The Holy Bible, Ecclesiastes, 3:19-22
"No, it is not because I am filled with obscure guilt that I step gently over, and not upon, an autumn cricket. It is not because of guilt that I refuse to shoot the last osprey from her nest in the tide marsh. I possess empathy; I have grown with man with his mind's growing. I share that sympathy and compassion which extends beyond the barriers of class and race and form until it partakes of the universal whole. I am not ashamed to profess this emotion, nor will I call it a pathology. Only through this experience many times repeated and enhanced does man become truly human. Only then will his gun arm be forever lowered. I pray that it may sometime be so."-- Loren Eiseley, (1907-1977)
"The greatest of all sources of pleasure is discovery. Given a plot of earth, whether in a suburban garden, a prairie, or a rain forest, it will be... crowded with insects. There are... many levels of discovery. The first seasonal report: the first swallowtail of spring crossing the backyard. The first personal discovery: perhaps a two-spotted lady beetle devouring rose aphids. The first regional record: perhaps a Carolina mantid in Montana. Or, of course, something wholly new to science: a new host relationship, new insights on behavior, fresh knowledge on details of life histories. Most estimates have it that only about half the existing species of insects have yet been named and described; most of these are in the tropics, but not all ... there are currently intensive research programs on such commonplace insects as hornworms, blister beetles, and honey bees. The air and the bushes are full of
wholly unstudied insect species. There seems no end of what may still be learned, and all of what we learn will have a bearing on our ultimate success in coexisting with insects." -- Howard Evans
"The trouble with writing about the wilderness is that there is almost none of it left, and so, although more and more writers are born, grow up and appear in print, fewer and fewer can possibly have had even an approximate acquaintance with the wild -- Edward Hoagland
"Unless the soul goes out to meet what we see, we do not see it; nothing do we see, not a beetle, not a blade of grass." -- William Henry Hudson (1841-1922)
Used with permission from ExtinctionMemorial.org.
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