We're adding a billion people every decade. We're just spin doctors. Whatever we do is supposedly great, and yet it's always at the expense of diversity and nature. We're like elephants. The ecology of the elephant is more similar to human than any other.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the impact of human growth on diversity and nature, likening humans to elephants in ecological terms.
Peter Beard's quote highlights the rapid increase in the human population and critiques the superficiality of our accomplishments, which often come at the cost of ecological balance and diversity. By comparing humans to elephants, Beard suggests that our ecological footprint and interdependence with nature are profound, urging a deeper reflection on our role in the world and the consequences of our actions for both the environment and ourselves.
In practice
In a discussion on environmental policies, one might quote Beard to emphasize the need for sustainable practices.
Despite their lack of visual impact, headline sex-appeal, and their 'out of sight, out of mind' nature, we should all care about aquatic dead zones because we are all connected to their causes and we all feel their impacts.
There is not a sprig of grass that shoots uninteresting to me.
Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.
Is it too late to prevent us from self-destructing? No, for we have the capacity to design our own future, to take a lesson from living things around us and bring our values and actions in line with ecological necessity. But we must first realize that ecological and social and economic issues are all deeply intertwined. There can be no solution to one without a solution to the others.
The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.
Earth is dry to the centre,_x000D_ But spring, a new comer,_x000D_ A spring rich and strange,_x000D_ Shall make the winds blow_x000D_ Round and round,_x000D_ Thro' and thro',_x000D_ Here and there,_x000D_ Till the air_x000D_ And the ground_x000D_ Shall be fill'd with life anew.
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