Wild New World Quotes

“Most recently science is rewriting biological histories, while helping us understand that the self-awareness and cultural richness we celebrate as human place us within animal life, not outside it. All is vanity to think otherwise.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“The late Harvard scientist E. O. Wilson has called this core human value biophilia, which he defined as a genetic memory of our emergence, a piercing love affair with the other life-forms that surround us on the planet. Our”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“A love of diverse life as old as our origins was always there to call on, and when we have done so we’ve bathed human history in a brighter light. This complex American story produced many inspiring, empathetic heroes, from Native peoples who preserved a wild continent largely intact for ten thousand years to naturalists compelled to know every detail of continental animal life, from visionaries who gave the world its first national parks to writers, activists, and politicians who confronted the destruction and loss of wild animals before it was too late.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“To lay out the wildlife story of those last five centuries in another way, since 1500 we Americans have managed to commit the largest single destruction of wild animals discoverable in modern history.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“Earth proved finite, and so did its animals.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“Long before the dawn of written history, human impacts were responsible for a fantastically destructive wave of extinctions around the globe.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“We wield the sword of extermination as we advance.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“Life is important to itself and to the ecologies it occupies without any reference to us.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“We all exist in a world handed down by the prior occupants. Like coming generations, who will have to live with a planet our generations have overheated, we, too, suffer from the selfishness of those who lived before us. In our case our ancestors left us a simplified and devastated Earth.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“The prescription I've come to seems to be this. Know the heaven and earth that was, but experience the world that is.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“Rather than mourn, I've tried to experience what's left. that's how I've attempted to cope with Thoreaku's anguish, and mine, over the America we never got to see.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“Not only are forests habitat for so many of the plant's threatened species, they're the planet's primary carbon sinks that scrub from the skies a good percentage of the warming gases our carbon economy is spewing.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“...we Americans have never been good at accepting blame for screwing up the world. Surely the gods, or the government, or the Chinese, or the sun! must be doing this. It can't be us.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“No deity chose us for world domination. NOr did evolution. We were omnivorious primates with hands adapted for tree life who took to open country because of the carnivorous economy it offered, whose perfection of hunting big, cangerous prey and avoiding preadators refined our cooperative social skills. Protein grew our brains and the hunting lifestyle transformed our verbalizations into rich language. Then we learned from one another for thousands of generations. So here we are.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“...we've thought of living creatures as mere resources in an economy designed to enrich us, and that has produced one ugly, depraved story after another, a history of inhumanity perpetrated by ordinary Americans in the name of freedom and the market, its cruelty and barbarism as often as not endorsed by government and sometimes even carried out by its agents. This is how we de-buffaloed, de-pigeoned, de-wolfed America.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“Our disruption of ecologies around the world isn't just threatening wildife extinctions. It's posing an existential threat to our own species.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“We're uncomfortable thinking of ourselves as having been carnivores, as killers. For that matter we're not used to thining of ourselves as a species, preferring terms like "the human race." And we almost never act as if we're another of Earth's animals. But of course we are all those things, and all are part of our Big HIstory.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“But losing American animals was a minor thing in the big picture, especially since the country seemed to believe that no one and no institutions were really to blame. Birds and animal species were just casualties of progress and civilization, we told ourselves, collateral damage in the act of creating the best country in the world.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“And it wasn't just passenger pigeons and buffalo. A legacy of animal cleansing was visible everywhere you looked in the United States of the 1920s.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“Texas the Friedkin site in the Hill Country.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America

“a powerful sense of being just off the apex of a gigantic sphere that’s spinning beneath a light source the universe has forgotten to switch off.”
― Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America