I was a senior in high school when I decided I wanted to work on ants as a career. I just fell in love with them, and have never regretted it.

Now when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and a few birds fluttering around in the canopy. You are drastically imperiling a vast array of species within a few square miles of you. The number of these species may go to tens of thousands. Many of them are still unknown to science, and science has not yet discovered the key role undoubtedly played in the maintenance of that ecosystem, as in the case of fungi, microorganisms, and many of the insects.

The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs.

Ants have the most complicated social organization on earth next to humans.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

The commitment must be much deeper - to let no species knowingly die; to take all reasonable action to protect every species and race in perpetuity.

Ants are the leading removers of dead creatures on the land. And the rest of life is substantially dependent upon them.