Notes & Comments

BIODIVERSITY, WARMING, AND EXTINCTION:
Thoughts from around the world

Biodiversity is the spectacular variety of life on Earth and the essential interdependence among all living things.
-- Michael Novacek (ed.), The Biodiversity Crisis: Losing What Counts (2008)

The life-sustaining matrix is built of green plants with legions of microorganisms and mostly small, obscure animals—in other words, weeds and bugs.
-- E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1993).

Because it is we who decide what plants will grow in our gardens, the responsibility for our nation’s biodiversity lies largely with us.
-- Douglas Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home (2007)

Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General: "Biodiversity is the foundation of life on earth and one of the pillars of sustainable development. . . . Environments rich in biodiversity are resilient when stricken by natural disaster. . . . However, biodiversity is being lost at an unprecedented rate. This, in turn, is seriously eroding the capacity of our planet to sustain life of earth."
  
"Message on the International Day for Biological Diversity," May 22, 2007, GINCANA 3: BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE, p. 2.

Bill McKibben: "Climate change isn't like other issues. It doesn't do any good to split the difference to reach a deal everyone can live with. Climate change is about the laws of physics and chemistry, and they don't give."
  
--quoted by Mark Hertsgard, "The Making of a Climate Movement," THE NATION, Oct. 22, 2007, p. 19. (McKibben is the author of THE END OF NATURE, the first [1989] and still one of the best popular books on climate change.)

Terry Glavin: "Our best hopes lie in strengthening the conditions that allow the flourishing of a diversity of living things, a diversity of ideas, and a diversity of choices.
"Extinction is the thing that destroys those very conditions, so you join the epic battle with the demons that are devouring the world and you do what you can. It's all anyone can expect of you. You do everything you can."
  
--The concluding sentences of THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: JOURNEYS AMONG THE LOST AND LEFT BEHIND (St. Martin's Press, 2007), p. 284.

"Every form of life is unique, warranting respect regardless of its worth to man, and to accord other organisms such recognition, man must be guided by a moral code of action."  

--United Nations Resolution A-RES-37-7, The World Charter for Nature, adopted October 28, 1982.