“One of the great joys of science has to be turning a thought that surfaced one night over a few beers into a full-blown project.”

“... the taxonomic division of animals in a lost Chinese encyclopedia...(a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those that are drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”

“When one photographer edged too close to the wolves, tirelessly dogging McIntyre for the best place to perch his bazooka-size lens I could see daggers in the eyes of the vvolunteers. But McIntyre was welcoming. Some individuals, her told me, could move freely about the valley; others were ruthlessly punished, chased off, or worse. He was talking about wolves.”

“Things got so bad that Georgia lawmakers introduced legislation to move the state border north- to seize land that had been in Tennessee since 1818- all to capture a river. The governor turned to Plan B: a miracle. "O, Father, we acknowledge our wastefulness," Sonny Perdue prayed on the steps of the Georgia state capitol in front of a crowd of about a hundred people.”

“Eating dinner with conservation biologists was like walking through a minefield of ethical decisions: grasslands have been overgrazed by steer raised for beef, and all cattle emit greenhouse gases though enteric fermentation; the poop from industrially raised chickens poisons the Chesapeake; the Amazon has been slashed and burned for soy--and don't even mention seafood. To this bunch of herpetologists, the sin of ordering shrimp lay in the bycatch--young fish, and especially sea turtles, caught in the nets and discarded, dead or dying.”

“Hey, it could be worse," Hammond said of their efforts to protect the woodpecker. "It could be a butterfly." Butterflies were easy, I said. I would soon go to see a couple of clam species that the governor of Georgia had accused of endangering the lives of his state's children. Matteson laughed, "Woodpeckers are pretty, but mussels?" And so it goes.”

“... to undertake a gargantuan task: calculate the value of all the services provided by all the ecosystems, from the forest to the floodplains to the open ocean, across the world... they came up with a number- $33 trillion a year- a headline-grabbing figure that was almost twice the global gross national product.”