The climate, the economic situation, rising birth rates; none of these things give me a lot of hope or reason to be optimistic.

Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment

People are not going to care about animal conservation unless they think that animals are worthwhile.

I don't approve of sunbathing, and it's bad for you.

I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? [...] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it.

This last chapter .. may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur.

No one will protect what they don't care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced.