We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.
Interpretation
To protect the environment, we must first develop a love for nature.
Stephen Jay Gould emphasizes the necessity of forming an emotional connection with nature in order to motivate efforts to preserve species and their habitats. Without this bond, the fight to save our environment lacks true commitment, as we are less likely to act for the benefit of what we do not cherish.
In practice
In a speech at an environmental conference, you might use the quote to emphasize the importance of emotional connection in conservation efforts.
The human mind delights in finding pattern—so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.
Some evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution?
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
For Dawkins, evolution is a battle among genes, each seeking to make more copies of itself. Bodies are merely the places where genes aggregate for a time.
A fish is more valuable swimming in the sea maintaining the integrity of oceanic eco-systems than it is on anyone's plate.
When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.
So many times I've photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet. I had one idea to go and photograph the factories that were polluting, and to see all the deposits of garbage. But, in the end, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet - to see the innocence.
How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains!
I see a world in the future in which we understand that all life is related to us and we treat that life with great humility and respect.
If lightning is the anger of the gods, then the gods are concerned mostly about trees.
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