"Fifty thousand species disappear from our planet every year - roughly six species per hour."
~ E.O Wilson, noted Harvard sociobiologist ~

"In the end, we will only conserve what we love, we will only love what we understand,
and we will only understand what we are taught."
~ Baba Dioum, Senegalese environmentalist ~

"Animals cannot speak to us; they have voices we will never hear. We must speak for them
and we must speak in a voice much louder than we have used in the past."
~ Jeffery P. Bonner, "Sailing with Noah" ~

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from the
universal nature, and living by complicated artiface, man in civilization surveys the creatures through
the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby the feather magnified and the whole image in
distortion. We patronize them for the most incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken
a form so far below ourselves., And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be
measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete,
gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall
never hear. They are not bretherin, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with
ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
~ Henry Benson "The Outermost House" ~

"Eliminate just one kind of tree in hundreds in a forest and some of its pollenators, leafcutters, and
woodborers will disappear with it, the various of their parasites and key predators, and perhaps
a species of bat or bird that depends on its fruit - and when will the reverberations end? Perhaps
not until a large diversity of the forest collapses like an arch crumbling when its keystone is pulled
away. More likely the effects will remain local, ending with a minor shift in the overall pattern of
abundance among the numerous surviving species. In either case the effects are beyond the
power of present-day ecologists to predict. It is enough to work on the assumption that all
of the details matter in the end, in some unknown and vital way."
~ E.O. Wilson ~

We are convinced within our culture and within virtually all the other cultures of this planet that the
worst thing that could befall our world is a global nuclear war. We have the capacity to wage
such a war, to wreak wholesale destruction on our planet, to make the earth uninhabitable for
ourselves and every other living thing. We understand it, and we as a culture of cultures do
everything in our power to ensure that such a thing never happens. Now.. "With that terrible
truism acknowledged, it must be added that if no country pulls the trigger, the worst thing
that will probably happen - in fact is well under way - is not energy depletion, economic collapse,
conventional war, or even the expansion of totalitarian governnments. As tragic as these
catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process now
going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by
the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendents are least likely to forgive us."
~ E. O. Wilson ~

"All that lives beneath Earth's fragile canopy is, in some elemental fashion, related. Is born, moves,
feeds, reproduces, dies. Tiger and turtle dove, each tiny flower and homely frog; the running child,
father to the man and, in ways as yet unknown, brother to the salamander. If mankind continues
to allow whole species to perish, when does their peril also become their own?"
~ World Wildlife Fund (WWF) ~

"When the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near."
~ Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric ~

"Zoos need to get to people's hearts before we get to their heads."
~ Jeffery P. Bonner, "Sailing with Noah" ~

"In the end, what may be the largest unknown as we look ahead, may be that we simply do not
know how to get our audience to care. If we cannot get them to care deeply and passionately,
about what we do, then zoos have no future. And if we have no future, then the rare and
wonderful species we have elected to save have no future, either."
~ Anonymous ~

"For the fate of the men and the fate of the animals is the same, as dies one, so dies the other."
~ Ecclesiastes ~

"The library of life is burning and we do not even know the titles of the books."
~ Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime Minster of Norway ~

"It's hard to walk around a good zoo without caring, deeply, about whether this miraculous
wealth of lovely, peculiar, creepy, unfathomable creatures survives or perishes."
~ Jeffery P. Bonner, "Sailing With Noah" ~

In the U.S it takes approximately 22 gallons of gasoline, 203 lbs of fertilizer, and 2 lbs of
chemical insecticides and pesticides to grow one acre of crops a year. It takes at least
8 calories in the form of fossil fuels to produce one calori of food! It takes 75 000 trees to
produce the Sunday edition of the New York Times. If Americans just recycled
one tenth of their newspapers they would save 25 million trees per year!

For hundreds of years, the Great Wall of China was the largest man-made structure in the world.
In 1991 it became the second largest. The largest is now the Fresh Kills landfill, which serves New York City.

Americans currently throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles an hour. For every glass bottle recycled,
enough energy could be saved to light a 100 watt bulb for 4 hours.

It takes and average of 6.9 acres to support each of the world's people. But the average american
takes 24 acres. The average German requires 12 acres, while the average Peruvian requires only 2.

American steel recycling saves enough energy to heat and light 18 million homes.
Aluminum recycling is up, and it takes 95% less energy to make aluminum through
recycling than it does to produce it through its natural ore, bauxite.

Where we once said, "Can we live with big predators?" we must now ask, "Can we live without them?"
~ Discovery Channel, Strange days on Planet Earth ~

Between 1883 - 1917 over 100 000 wolves were killed for bounty in Wyoming and Montana alone.
By the 1970's they were listed an endangered species in the USA. In 1995, 31 wolves from from
Canada were brought to Yellowknife as part of a a controversial conservation program.
Wolf kills are an epicenter of animal activity - one kill serves hundreds of of species such as crows,
ravens, black bears, grizzleys, eagles, coyotes, magpies mice, and a huge variety of insects.
By removing the wolves as top predators it allowed elk to browse unabated which eliminated the
aspen trees and willows. When elk have to move more frequently, the trees and plants have a
chance to grow and establish themselves which in turn allows the ecosystem to restore itself and survive.

"An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language."
~ Martin Buber, "I and Thou" ~

"I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and
contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me."
~ Mark Twain, "Letters from the Earth" ~

"If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for
whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected."
~ Chief Seattle, letter to President Franklin Pierce ~

"There are two things for which animals are to be envied: they know
nothing of future evils, or of what people say about them."
~ Voltaire ~

"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd, I stand and look
at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie
awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty
to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is
respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. So they show their relations to me and I
accept them, They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession."
~ Walt Whitman, "Leaves of Grass" ~

"With beasts you always know precisely what they think, for they cannot lie, nor pretend to be other than they are."
~ Marion Zimmer Bradley, "The Mists of Avalon" ~