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.
Ask the beasts and they will teach you the beauty of this earth.
For me, being green means cleaning up the water. Water is the key. Start with water. You can't ignore the fact that that nearly 80% of US waterways are potentially poisoned - benzene, solvents, heavy metals, pharmaceuticals.
The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please.
We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.
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