“The default stance of conservation is to keep things as unchanged as possible or, alternatively, to return conditions to what they used to be, or somehow to make the Earth ‘more natural’ (which can usually be interpreted as meaning ‘with reduced human impact’). Not only are these untenable aspirations while the world’s human population continues to grow and each of us consumes more resources, but hold-the-line strategies implicitly dismiss as undesirable the continuing biological gains of the human epoch. Where is the logic in this? Attempting to prevent the establishment of ‘alien’ arrivals and to kill ‘impure’ new hybrids so as to maintain our ecosystems and species in some idealized state is not possible, nor is it obvious that the past state of the world is objectively preferable to the new state that is coming into existence.” -page 8
“Rearrangement followed by rearrangement is the norm. That is how species survive climate change. They move around. This is true even of species that are today confined to shrinking distributions in isolated mountains. They have survived because they have been able to move, even if that has only been up and down the same mountain. The greatest risk they face in the future is the possibility that they may not be able to move again.” -page 84
“Any attempt by humans to keep things just as they are is utterly pointless.” -page 84
“It seems to take somewhere between five hundred and two thousand years to convert xenophobia into love.” -page 105
“Intensive conservation efforts are lavished on the hybrid wisent. While conservationists will dismiss this hybridization as too long ago to worry about, measured against the long timeline of life on Earth, this ‘ancient’ hybridization happened at more or less the same time as the modern hybridization between the cattle and American bison. Yet our response to the two events are very different.
There seems to be a deep-seated feeling that every animal should be pure, whereas we know that, in reality, every individual of every species is likely to have at least some degree of past hybridization lurking within its genes. This attitude to genetic purity makes no biological sense, and it is not a viable way of managing the Earth. The exchange of genetic information between organisms that we usually think of as distinct – hybridization – is one of the ways in which new genetic forms come into existence and genetic fitness can potentially be increased.” -page 195
“Even if we were to remove every human from the surface of the planet today, it would not revert to what it once was.” -page 214