"Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it."

"We are all travelers in … the wilderness of this world … and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend."

"Beauty is a resource in and of itself. … I hope the United States of America is not so rich that she can afford to let these wildernesses pass by, or so poor she cannot afford to keep them."

"The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need — if only we had the eyes to see."

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread."

"The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs more defenders."

"He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness."

"I tried to break the spell — the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness — that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions."

"The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans. Our challenge for the future is that we realize we are very much a part of the earth's ecosystem, and we must learn to respect and live according to the basic biological laws of nature."

"There is in every American, I think, something of the old Daniel Boone — who, when he could see the smoke from another chimney, felt himself too crowded and moved further out into the wilderness."

"If I had my way about national parks, I would create one without a road in it. I would have it impenetrable forever to automobiles, a place where man would not try to improve upon God."

"Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own."

"Many of the attributes most distinctive of America and Americans are the impress of the wilderness. … Shall we now exterminate this thing that made us Americans?"

"If we lose our wilderness, we have nothing left, in my opinion, worth fighting for; or to be more exact, a completely industrialized United States is of no consequence to me."

"Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?"

"Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization."

"In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia."

"Around two million years ago, a staggering ninety percent of the mammalian biomass in Africa and Asia was made up of elephants, hippos, and their rhinoceros-like buddies. This impressive lineup included at least nine species of elephants, four species of hippos, two species of rhinos, and a large cousin of the rhino-tapir-horse family known as Ancylotherium. The biggest shake-up in megafaunal species in Africa happened about 1.4 million years ago, roughly 300,000 years after Homo erectus made its debut and Australopithecus had disappeared. Since then, Africa and Asia have continued to experience megafaunal extinction events in fits and starts. Interestingly, during this two-million-year stretch, no large animal species went extinct on continents devoid of hominids, highlighting a unique and telling chapter in the evolutionary tale of the respective regions. The biodiversity of megafaunal species that roamed Europe and North America before humans showed up paints a fascinating picture—species like woolly mammoths, mastodons, and woolly rhinoceroses may have made up about 50% of the mammalian biomass in these regions. While this figure is less than what we saw in the Afroasian region, the megafaunal lineup in Europe and North America included some hefty ungulates that outclassed today’s bison in size. For instance, three species of bison, including the giant bison (Bison latifrons), were larger than the modern bison (Bison bison), but were swept away following the arrival of Homo sapiens. Although primary productivity remained unchanged with the extinction of the largest megafaunal animals, their loss created a vacuum that was quickly filled by a surge in populations of smaller critters, like bison and wildebeest. The absence of very large animals led to noticeably different effects on plants and soils, as more numerous smaller animals took their place. Overlooking the finite nature of the planet's primary productivity and the unique impacts of these smaller, more abundant species has fueled the persistence of [these] ecological myths […]. These misconceptions have led to a mixed bag of largely ineffective conservation efforts—some genuinely well-intentioned and others disingenuous."

"Megafaunal extinctions were just one act in the grand drama of the sixth mass extinction, which has been and will continue to include a plethora of plants and animals."

"When we look at the extinction of megafaunal animals in isolation, it ignores the chain reaction that led to the loss of tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands, of soil microorganisms and other tiny creatures."

"Long before the 20th century, the trajectory was set. Mesopotamia formalized private property and profit. Rome industrialized deforestation, mining, and overfishing. Every civilization reshaped ecosystems to sustain its growth and eventually collapsed when the foundations that supported it were exhausted. Deep time offers an even harder truth: humans began erasing biodiversity more than two million years ago. Civilization didn’t invent destruction; it scaled it. What changed in the last century was the speed, the technology, and the reach of decision-makers who could alter entire biomes with a single signature."

"The most wretched of all current trends is of course the mass extinction of organisms, which has been escalating for decades and is still increasing in magnitude."

"We are such great innovators that we have devised a way to be so successful that we are eliminating other species by transforming their habitat into ours serving only us and a few (both domesticated and wild) species who can tolerate living with us. By doing so, we are sawing off the limb upon which we are perched because those species support our own existence. Is it really any surprise that we hear constantly about alligator attacks, bear attacks, whale attacks, and shark attacks? Those four links go mainly to fatal attacks and not just injuries sustained by such attacks, but it should be fairly obvious to even the casual observer that we often forget that we don't truly "own" the areas where these creatures live. They live there, too, and we are encroaching upon their habitat. We have created the illusion in our minds that we are "safe" in these areas simply because we have labeled the land "ours." Nature doesn't recognize our labels, unfortunately, and one must be aware of this fact whenever [we enter] areas where wild animals live."

"Humans… have pursued our distinctively destructive path for a sliver of the total biotime in this corner of the galaxy. This most recent reshaping of nature began 3.3 million years ago, when an australopithecine made stone tools to butcher animal carcasses on the shores of the Jade Sea, or Lake Turkana, in Kenya. Weapons came later, with the use of stone-tipped thrusting spears by another hominid in South Africa 500,000 years ago, and the development of the bow and arrow by early humans 71,000 years ago. Projectile weapons, like the bow and arrow, allowed us to kill large animals without being excessively brave. Through a combination of these weapons, coupled with traps and fire, humans saw to the extinction of woolly mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed cats and ground sloths as the ice sheets receded and we pursued the animals to their last redoubts. A South American armadillo-like animal called Glyptodon was another victim of the genocide. This slow-moving vegetarian was as big as a Volkswagen Beetle and served as an easy target for hunters who ate its meat and crawled into its enormous shells for shelter. For many years, biologists argued that climate change was the most important factor in these extinctions, but more and more evidence points to the correspondence between the arrival of humans and the disappearance of large mammals. The case was pretty obvious for the spectacular bird life of islands, with a giant turkey called Sylviornis disappearing from New Caledonia soon after the prehistoric Lapita people arrived in their canoes 3,500 years ago, and the elimination of numerous species of flightless moa when the Maori reached New Zealand around AD 1300. Extinction has been reworking nature from its beginnings, but no animal has come close to having the impact that humans have had. With remarkable speed, our evolution walloped life with the power of the asteroid that obliterated the dinosaurs. The average size of mammals increased steadily throughout the Cenozoic Era that followed the crash of the Chicxulub asteroid in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago. Then, around 100,000 years ago, the big animals began to disappear. The extinctions accelerated 50,000 years ago and the total mass of wild mammals has now plunged to a sixth of its pre-human maximum. According to some models, the domestic cow is on track to become the largest remaining mammal. Scepticism surrounding these doom-laden predictions about the precarious nature of nature is understandable. It takes imagination to escape from the influence of the diminishing expectations of each generation. Nobody has seen a live moa since the fourteenth century and so their absence does not upset New Zealanders today. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died… in 1914, and the most recent sky-darkening mass migrations of these birds took flight in the nineteenth century. We cannot miss something that has never existed for us. We read about extinction as an approaching horror and ecosystem damage as a work in progress rather than a done deal. But the destruction is unabated. Despite the publicity given to deforestation, tropical woodlands continue to disappear at an annual rate of 2.7 million hectares in Brazil, 1.3 million hectares in Indonesia and 0.6 million hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Turning to the direct effects of climate change, one-third of the world’s coral reefs were damaged by high water temperatures in 2016. More than 90 per cent of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was affected by the process called bleaching, which happens when the dinoflagellate algae abandon their animal partners in the exquisite coral symbiosis. When reefs recover from bleaching, the original animals are replaced by sluggish coral species that support impoverished communities of marine life. This is not a normal phenomenon."

"In the 1970s, we started noticing extinctions taking place right before our eyes. Attenborough makes the point that no one wanted animals to become extinct, but that lack of awareness and a focus on personal benefits obscured the unfolding tragedy. Having largely eliminated or isolated ourselves from predators, achieved control over diseases, and mastered food to order, nothing was left to restrict or stop us."

"If we do not devise an intentional method of suppressing human exceptionalism, we will foul the nest to the point of self-harm (sound familiar?) by precipitating an ecosystem collapse. In this unfortunate, unwitting undoing, we will have answered evolution’s question: how far can intelligence be pushed as a survival strategy before it is self-terminating? Or worse than self-terminating: taking numerous other innocent species down with us."

"Our fossil fuel bonanza has left our ecosystem in a perilous state. We have destroyed vast forests and habitat, polluted water and soil, kicked off a rapid climate trend that natural systems may not adapt to quickly enough, and basically overrun the planet. […] 96% of mammal mass on the planet is now in the form of humans and our livestock, leaving a paltry 4% of wild mammals—land and sea. Roughly 70% of vertebrate numbers have vanished since 1970 (undoubtedly a higher fraction if the survey had started in 1700). Forests are also way down."

"…because of megafauna extinctions, being the only species to use fire, and the fact that an ability for symbolic representation and complex speech might be the recipe for a runaway species capable of rapid cultural evolution and technology development out of step with the rest of the community of life, and therefore maladapted to long-term co-existence in ecological relationship. If it looks like we’re winning the “battle against nature” right now, that’s actually what losing looks like."

"Compared to the human accomplishment of driving the globe into a sixth mass extinction... elephants are shamefully worthless and lacking a final goal, as are all 10 million species on the planet—including us."

"Having initiated a sixth mass extinction, carried out by access to energy, continued powering of modernity (via electricity, for instance) most likely means compounding ecological harm, piling up accelerating extinctions, under which conditions high-maintenance humans are unlikely to fare well."

"The scale and rapidity of these changes create credible concern that we are witnessing (causing) the beginning of a sixth mass extinction. Earth has been slapped hard, out of nowhere, at alarming speed. Although the evidence of its reeling is all around us, it is far too soon to appreciate the severity of what we have set in motion. A hard slap on the face looks red in the moment, but later appears bruised and might turn into a black eye. We are currently only seeing the instant, real-time response and not the protracted bruising to follow, which will take a long time to play out as many wild populations glide toward extinction and domino-effect failures pile up. […] Ecological collapse is extremely dangerous to large, complex, hungry, high-maintenance animals like humans. We are not likely to fare well in a sixth mass extinction of our own making."

"We have loads of evidence for rapidly declining ecological health, in virtually every measure. Accelerating biodiversity loss rates are consistent with the initiation of a sixth mass extinction. Modernity has every appearance of being grossly unsustainable."

"Extinction rates are up 100–1,000 times the background rate—and possibly higher [and] we are currently witnessing the highest extinction rate since the Chicxulub impact that took out dinosaurs 65 million years ago. […] Annual population declines tend to be in the 1–2% range among mammals, birds, fish, and insects, accumulating to average declines of more than half in less than half a century."

"Finding out that 1 million species face extinction without radical corrective changes in human behavior is akin to finding out you have a fatal disease. One day you have a thousand problems; the next, you have just one. Nothing in today’s headlines compares to the catastrophic potential posed by climate change and the decimating effects of careless consumerism around the globe."

"In what year will the human population grow too large for the Earth to sustain? The answer is about 1970, according to research by the . In 1970, the planet's 3 and a half billion people were . But on this New Year's Day, the population is 8 billion. Today, wild plants and animals are running out of places to live."

"Indeed, in the long run, extinctions of species are as inevitable as the deaths of individual animals, and it may be that the causes of extinctions are as varied as the causes of individual deaths. A wave of extinctions—a sudden diminution in the number of species—is analogous to a sudden big drop in the size of a human population, an event that deserves to be explained even though the individual people would inevitably have died sooner or later anyway. Catastrophes in human populations have many causes: war, famine, and pestilence are the possibilities that first spring to mind. There may be equally many causes for evolutionary catastrophes, as waves of extinctions could well be called. Another possibility, however, is that extinctions come in waves that are part of a recurring cycle. It would then be the cycle itself, rather than each individual wave in the cycle, that would need to be explained. If there is such a cycle, it presumably follows a cycle in the inorganic world, such as cyclic climactic changes."

"Moreover, we have unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years, wherein many current life forms could be annihilated or at least committed to extinction by the end of this century."

"Given that human societies, before they migrated out of Africa, in significant numbers were as close to sustainable as we’re likely to get, that is the best we can hope for, at least for future generations. But let’s not pretend that there is some sustainable way of life for future humans (our species) that we could hope they would attain. We’ve done that experiment. Humans didn’t live in harmony with nature. They got close, but ultimately couldn’t restrain themselves from causing some extinctions and then many more extinctions when they followed their migratory traits."

"Species are threatened because of over-exploitation, habitat destruction, climate change, and so on. Efforts to reverse, or stall, a decline in population would have to go on indefinitely (i.e. would have to be sustainable) unless all of the factors involved in the decline are removed. But modernity is the cause of all of those factors so conservation will inevitably fail until modernity ends (and then there would be no conservation efforts with humans needing to be more involved in saving their own lives)."

"Long before the first kings, priests, or merchants inscribed their deeds in clay or papyrus, humans were altering ecosystems simply by moving through them. The great dispersal of our species out of Africa, beginning roughly 60,000–70,000 years ago, reshaped continents. Wherever humans arrived, waves of extinctions followed: giant marsupials in Australia, mammoths and mastodons across the Americas, enormous birds in New Zealand and Madagascar. These losses were not caused by Western civilization, or any civilization at all, but by small bands of foragers equipped with nothing more than stone tools, spears, and fire."

"Since after extinction no one will be present to take responsibility, we have to take full responsibility now."

"[The transition from Australopithecus to Homo] marked the shift from hominins that depend heavily on plants to ones that depend more on meat… Being a good predator is a general feature of our genus."

"[We] cannot bring back species from extinction… We are still driving 150 species to oblivion daily… Collapse will not change anything in our attitudes. As long as humans remain genetically identical to who they are today, I’m afraid they will collapse again, and again, after this coming collapse, and probably risk complete extinction. This is not speculation, but simply looking at historical evidence: over thousands of years we have collapsed pretty much constantly—anthropologists have documented the collapse of more than 82 (!!!) civilisations. We are now at the stage of a systemic, global collapse because we are one, united global economic machine that has used up everything on the planet. Our species is wired for growth, and we are designed to go through boom-and-bust cycles. What comes after the next bust will be a significantly smaller civilisation… There will be another, smaller boom, then collapse again. With each collapse many… “species” risk disappearance."

"[The Sixth Extinction] did not happen yesterday because we suddenly became aware of the dangers of global warming. It began 50,000 years ago when a relatively hairless primate stumbled out of equatorial Africa and began wiping out the megafauna of the time. Wherever this creature (our ancestor) went, their arrival was followed by large die-outs of megafauna. Primitive hominids were well-organized, efficient, slaughter crews. As they advanced, the mammoth, sabre-toothed cats, cave bears, giant sloths, camels, horses, and wholly rhinos fell to their stone weapons and deliberately set fires. The extinction of all of these great mega-species is directly attributable to "primitive" human hunters. The hunting down of the mega-fauna was followed by the advent of agriculture and the domestication of selected animals. Domesticated cows, goats, sheep, and pigs grew in numbers and denuded large areas of grasslands. Irrigation systems began to toxify land. Then agriculture was followed by industrial activities, and finally, by the burning off of vast amounts of fossil fuels."

"We are now living in the era of the sixth extinction crisis in the history of the planet, the last one occurring 65 million years ago when a meteor struck the Gulf of Mexico and annihilated half of existing species including the dinosaurs. Unlike the last five, however, the sixth extinction crisis is caused by human activity."

"A few years ago, virtually no one was talking about this . . . everyone just assumed that the web of life would always be intact. Now the situation is so severe that the United Nations has set up a special task force to monitor it: the (IPBES). In 2019, it published its – a groundbreaking assessment of the planet's living species, drawing on 15,000 studies from around the world and representing the consensus of hundreds of scientists. It found an accelerating rate of global , unprecedented in human history."

"Life may be unique to Earth. Even if single-celled organisms can readily evolve in conditions that exist on millions or billions of other planets, we have no actual evidence that complex, multi-cellular life exists anywhere else in the vastness of space. Bacteria appeared on our planet roughly 3.7 billion years ago; by 2 billion years ago, the tree of life was branching into what would become a stunning web of creatures, huge and tiny. Plants, animals, and fungi proliferated, formed relationships, and produced ecosystems. The result was a planet full of life, and one whose atmosphere, temperature, chemical composition, and weather are all largely shaped by the side effects of the strategies that organisms use to thrive. However, in a matter of mere centuries, we humans are unraveling the web of life and triggering a mass extinction event that is likely to impact virtually all species on the Earth, and to destabilize the fundamental planetary systems upon which we too depend. Mass extinctions have happened before. The web of life is, paradoxically, both resilient and fragile. On five previous occasions (most recently the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction 65 million years ago) our world lost up to 95 percent of its species. The current wave of extinctions that’s being triggered by humans is, so far, not on the same scale, but it is proceeding far more rapidly than previous ones. We humans represent a new kind of threat to the rest of life: our development of language, tool-making, and fire-spreading rendered us hyper-effective hunters and foragers. Tens of thousands of years ago, we were already reshaping landscapes and impacting wildlife. Our ability to expand our own habitat has generated unwanted results: some prey animals were hunted to extinction, and in a process of competitive exclusion, humans caused many local extirpations by appropriating the resources of habitats for themselves. These unintended effects then impacted humans themselves, often by compromising their food supply. Therefore, over time, humans who stayed in any given ecosystem long enough to learn its limits embraced cultural traditions to moderate their demands on it. However, since the start of the European conquest of most of the rest of the world, and especially since society’s rapid adoption of fossil fuels starting around 1800, human impact on the biosphere has accelerated at a breathtaking pace. Expanding human populations and associated land use changes, industrial agriculture, industrial forestry, industrial-scale fishing, proliferation of toxic chemicals, and climate change are decimating native species of plants and animals around the world. According to some estimates, populations of many non-domesticated species have declined, on average, by 70 percent, and the pace of species extinctions has quickened to 100 or more times the usual or “background” rate. What will the world come to look like if these trends continue? In one scenario, Earth will have become fully domesticated in a century or two, so that humans and machines control planetary systems (including climate patterns, ocean currents, the water cycle, and the carbon cycle). In this possible case, very little of wild nature will be left. In the far more likely scenario, the unraveling of the web of life and the destabilization of planetary systems will lead to the collapse not just of biodiversity but civilization as well. Is it too late to save biodiversity and the living Earth? … I’ll argue that only a collective effort to put wild nature at the center of our priorities will prevent its devastation and the possible disappearance of our own species, among countless others."

"We are experiencing an accelerated obliteration of the planet’s life-forms — an estimated 8,760 species die off per year — because, simply put, there are too many people. Most of these extinctions are the direct result of the expanding need for energy, housing, food and other resources. The , , , , , , and are all victims of human overpopulation. Population growth, as E. O. Wilson says, is "the monster on the land." Species are vanishing at a rate of a hundred to a thousand times faster than they did before the arrival of humans. If the current rate of extinction continues, Homo sapiens will be one of the few life-forms left on the planet, its members scrambling violently among themselves for water, food, fossil fuels and perhaps air until they too disappear. Humanity, Wilson says, is leaving the , the age of mammals, and entering the Eremozoic — the era of solitude. As long as the Earth is viewed as the personal property of the human race, a belief embraced by everyone from Christians to Marxists to free-market economists, we are destined to soon inhabit a biological wasteland."