Beloved Beasts Quotes

“As Leopold, in one of his grimmer moods, wrote to a friend, “That the situation is hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.”
― Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“As individuals and as species, living organisms are part of interdependent communities, existing within a web of mutualisms that Leopold once imagined as “a universal symbiosis.” Given the harm our species is capable of doing to others, it’s understandable that over the course of the conservation movement, some have tried to sever our relationships with other species, drawing hard boundaries in an attempt to limit our exploitation of other forms of life. Boundaries have been useful to conservation—and will continue to be. But the lesson of ecology, much like that of Aesop’s fables, is that human relationships with the rest of life are both inescapable and inescapably complex. The great challenge of conservation is to sustain complexity, in its many forms, and by doing so protect the possibility of a future for all life on earth. And for that, there are no panaceas.”
― Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“2020 they included a newly recognized species of Smaug, a genus of southern African lizards named after the “most specially greedy, strong and wicked” dragon in The Hobbit;”
― Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“Early conservationists were divided by arguments between utilitarians, who were primarily interested in sustaining herds and forests for human use, and preservationists, who mostly wanted to protect species and landscapes from human interference.”
― Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“What a piece of work we are. Darwin, riffing on Hamlet and anticipating Aldous Huxley, concluded The Descent of Man with the observation that “man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature … with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” We are not as gods but as frogs, and we had better get good at it.”
― Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“Emmanuel Frimpong at work in Toms Creek, June 2020. Ecologists who study relationships among species have traditionally focused on competition and predation—because of their established importance to evolution, and because they are often more obvious and easier to document than cooperation. Researchers have paid relatively less attention to mutually beneficial relationships, called mutualisms, and reports of them have sometimes been met with the same kind of skepticism that greeted Elinor Ostrom’s work on human cooperation. On and around the bluehead chub nests of Toms Creek, however, Frimpong and his students found that while fish of different species often challenge one another on first encounter, they quickly settle into a détente, joining a collective that serves at least ten of the creek’s fish species.”
― Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“While Soulé didn’t mention Leopold, the postulates were his land ethic for conservation biology: A thing is right when it tends to preserve biological diversity, ecological complexity, and the evolutionary process. It is wrong when it leads to untimely extinctions.”
― Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction

“biotic violence”
― Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction