• Our species retains hereditary traits that add greatly to our destructive impact. We are tribal and aggressively territorial, intent on private space beyond minimal requirements, and oriented by selfish sexual and reproductive drives. Cooperation beyond the family and tribal levels comes hard.
• The human species is, in a word, an environmental hazard. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.
• People are programmed by their genetic heritage to be so selfish that a sense of global responsibility will come too late.
• Today the human mind still works only comfortably backward and forward for only a few years, spanning a period not exceeding one or two generations.
• Exemptionalism holds that since humankind is transcendent in intelligence and spirit, our species must have been released from the iron laws of ecology that bind all other species.
• Environmentalism sees humanity as a biological species tightly dependent on the natural world. However formidable our intellect may be and however fierce our spirit, those qualities are not enough to free us from the constraints of the natural environment in which the human ancestors evolved.
• Even a small loss in area reduces the number of species. The relation is such that when the area of the habitat is cut to one-tenth of its original cover, the number of species eventually drops by roughly one-half.
• Young or old, all living species are direct descendants of the organisms that lived 3.8 billion years ago.
• Even though some 1.4 million species of organisms have been discovered, the total number alive on earth is somewhere between 10 and 100 million. No one can say with confidence which of these figures is the closer. of the species given scientific names, fewer than 10% have been studied at a level deeper than gross anatomy. The revolution in molecular biology and medicine was achieved with a still smaller fraction, altogether comprising no more than a hundred species.
• What difference does it make if some species are extinguished, if even half of the species on earth disappear? New sources of scientific information will be lost. Vast potential biological wealth will be destroyed.
• Human advance is determined not by reason alone but by emotions peculiar to our species, aided and tempered by reason.
• Only in the last moment of human history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world.
• People acquire phobias, abrupt and intractable aversions, to the objects and circumstances that threaten humanity in natural environments.
• People are both repelled and fascinated by snakes, even when they have never seen one in nature. Manhattanites dream of them with the same frequency as Zulus.
• The favoured living places of most peoples is a prominence near water from which parkland can be viewed.
• Given the means and sufficient leisure, a large portion of the populace backpacks, hunts, fishes, birdwatches, and gardens.
• Biophilia, the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life
• We do not understand ourselves yet and descend farther from heaven’s air if we forget how much the natural world means to us.
• Biophilia is not a single instinct but a complex of learning rules that can be teased apart and analysed individually.
• The brain evolved in a biocentric world, not a machine-regulated one. It would therefore be quite extraordinary to find that all learning rules related to that world had been erased in a few thousand years, even in the tiny minority of humans who have existed for more than one or two generations in wholly urban environments.