Quotes about Conservation for People that Love the Natural World
These Quotes about Conservation come from a wide variety of naturalists, novelists, thinkers and doers across a large span of historical time and spectrum of backgrounds.
They offer a way into the minds of the many people that believe planet earth does not need to be destroyed and its animals made extinct.
Conservation is the “study of the loss of Earth’s biological diversity and the ways this loss can be prevented. Biological diversity, or biodiversity, is the variety of life either in a particular place or on the entire planet Earth, including its ecosystems, species, populations, and genes. Conservation thus seeks to protect life’s variety at all levels of biological organization.”
This article was written using 100% recycled words.
Quotes about conservation
“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
“I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”
– E.O. Wilson
“Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walking
Try these inspiring quotes about rivers
“No matter how few possessions you own or how little money you have, loving wildlife and nature will make you rich beyond measure.”
– Paul Oxton
“Never apologize for being over sensitive and emotional when defending the welfare of wildlife.
Let this be a sign that you have a big heart and aren’t afraid to show your true feelings.
These emotions give you the strength to fight for what is right and to be the voice of those who cannot be heard.”
– Paul Oxton
“No one in the world needs a Rhino horn but a Rhino.”
– Paul Oxton
“Humankind must learn to understand that the life of an animal is in no way less precious than our own.”
– Paul Oxton
“children who spent time in green spaces between the ages of seven and twelve tend to think of nature as magical. As adults they are the people most likely to be indignant about lack of nature protection, while those who have had no such experience tend to regard nature as hostile or irrelevant and are indifferent to its loss. By expurgating nature from children’s lives we are depriving the environment of its champions for the future.”
– Isabella Tree, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm
Try these inspiring quotes from Robert MacFarlane
“Wildlife in the world can only be protected by the love of compassionate hearts in the world!”
– Mehmet Murat ildan, Quotes about Conservation
“Walk in kindness toward the Earth and every living being. Without kindness and compassion for all of Mother Nature’s creatures, there can be no true joy; no internal peace, no happiness. Happiness flows from caring for all sentient beings as if they were your own family, because in essence they are. We are all connected to each other and to the Earth.”
– Sylvia Dolson, Joy of Bears
“Wherever there are wild animals in the world, there is always an opportunity for caring, compassion and kindness.”
– Paul Oxton, Quotes about Conservation
“Nature, it seems, has a way of returning things to how they should be.”
– Fennel Hudson, Wild Carp – Fennel’s Journal – No. 4
“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”
– Chris Maser, Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest
“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
“To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
“We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.”
– Theodore Roosevelt
“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”
– Gary Snyder
“Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.”
– George Carlin
“…An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone’s hand…”
– Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
“In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.”
– Jane Goodall
“To be poor and be without trees, is to be the most starved human being in the world. To be poor and have trees, is to be completely rich in ways that money can never buy.”
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die
“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.”
– Jacques-Yves Cousteau
“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”
– Rachel Carson
“No settled family or community has ever called its home place an “environment.” None has ever called its feeling for its home place “biocentric” or “anthropocentric.” None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as “ecological,” deep or shallow.
The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of “ecology” and “ecosystems.” But the terms themselves are culturally sterile.
They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people.
And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” We are connected by work even to the places where we don’t work, for all places are connected; it is clear by now that we cannot exempt one place from our ruin of another.
The name of our proper connection to the earth is “good work,” for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing.
Good work is always modestly scaled, for it cannot ignore either the nature of individual places or the differences between places, and it always involves a sort of religious humility, for not everything is known.
Good work can be defined only in particularity, for it must be defined a little differently for every one of the places and every one of the workers on the earth.
The name of our present society’s connection to the earth is “bad work” – work that is only generally and crudely defined, that enacts a dependence that is ill understood, that enacts no affection and gives no honor.
Every one of us is to some extent guilty of this bad work. This guilt does not mean that we must indulge in a lot of breast-beating and confession; it means only that there is much good work to be done by every one of us and that we must begin to do it.”
– Wendell Berry, Quotes about Conservation
“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a spectulator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
“Now we, if not in the spirit, have been caught up to see our earth, our mother, Gaia Mater, set like a jewel in space. We have no excuse now for supposing her riches inexhaustible nor the area we have to live on limitless because unbounded. We are the children of that great blue white jewel. Through our mother we are part of the solar system and part through that of the whole universe. In the blazing poetry of the fact we are children of the stars.”
– William Golding
If you enjoyed these quotes about conservation and want to learn more about how to help then check out the amazing satirical website “The Platypus News”.
