Fred Pearce > Quotes

“Conservationists who want to cosset nature like a delicate flower, to protect it from the threat of alien species, are the ethnic cleansers of nature, neutralizing the forces that they should be promoting.”
― Fred Pearce, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation

“Conservationists, it seems, are dedicated to protecting the weak and vulnerable, the endangered and the abused. Nature generally promotes the strong and the wily, the resilient and versatile.”
― Fred Pearce, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation

“What can it mean, 150 years after Darwin, to say that some species or communities are good and some are bad?”
― Fred Pearce, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation

“If, as I believe, natural regrowth has to be the basis for the renaissance of the world’s trees, then the custodians of that process must be the people who live in, among and from them.”
― Fred Pearce, A Trillion Trees: Restoring Our Forests by Trusting in Nature

“This Cinderella ecology isn’t so new in Britain. The last windfall of sites for rare natives and exotic invaders happened after bombs dropped on London and elsewhere in World War II. The profusion of unexpected species that populated the craters was so great that it was rumored they had been dropped with the bombs as biological weapons of war.7 The Moroccan poppy and the American willow herb were both first spotted in Britain in the remains of bombed-out buildings in the City of London and subsequently spread across Britain. Those were good times for thorn apple from North America and rosebay willow herb from the Yukon, which was nicknamed “bombweed” by Cockney Londoners. Some were newcomers, but many were old arrivals. The daisy-like gallant soldier, its common name a corruption of its Latin name Galinsoga parviflora, came to Kew Gardens from Peru in the 1790s but proliferated unexpectedly in the bomb craters.”
― Fred Pearce, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation

“We may think of volcanic islands like Ascension as unusual because their recent origin and remoteness mean their ecosystems are made up of a motley crew of mariner migrants. But much of the world is like that. Nature is constantly in flux, and few ecosystems go back very far. Only ten thousand years ago, much of Europe and North America were covered in thick ice. All soil had been scraped away and with it most forms of life. Everything we see today in these former glaciated zones has either returned or arrived for the first time since the ice retreated.
Looked at from this perspective, the spread of alien species today is merely a continuation of a natural process of the colonization begun when the ice retreated. A broad time horizon shows there is no such thing as a native species. All lodgings are temporary and all ecosystems in a constant flux, the victims of circumstance and geological accident. As the pioneer British ecologist Charles Elton argued, “Were it not for the ice age, we [in Britain] should probably have wonderful mixed forests with wild magnolias and laurels and epiphytic orchids, such as . . . in China.”
― Fred Pearce, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation

“When the Suez Canal opened in 1869, it allowed tropical species from the waters of the Indian Ocean to move into the Mediterranean. And they did. Yet while 250 species of all kinds established themselves, there has only been one recorded extinction. Similarly, when the Panama Canal joined the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans in 1914, biodiversity increased on both sides. North America has morre birds and mammal species than when the Europeans first landed. And the addition of some four thousand plant species has added 20 percent to biodiversity and not, so far as is known, resulted in a single plant species being lost. Likewise, the UK’s twenty-three hundred additional species have not directly caused any known local extinctions.”
― Fred Pearce, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature's Salvation

“By elevating the conservation status of supposedly pristine parts of nature, and disregarding the rest – the new wild – conservationists end up complicit in forest destruction and biodiversity loss. *”
― Fred Pearce, The New Wild: Why invasive species will be nature's salvation

“I am a reporter on climate change. I have been following the topic for New Scientist magazine in the UK and others for twenty years now. And when I talk to climate scientists during their coffee breaks and at their private conferences—as I have done extensively both before and after completing this book—I hear them warn that the current accepted predictions could be much too optimistic; that their statistical models of climate, sophisticated though they undoubtedly are, badly underestimate the forces of change; that we could be close to triggering sudden lurches in the world’s climate. Hence the subtitle of the book: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change.”
― Fred Pearce, With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change

“In general, the well-off have the money to outsource their deforesting as they buy food and other commodities grown by clearing land in other countries. As we have seen, they don’t stop deforesting, they just do it somewhere far from home.”
― Fred Pearce, A Trillion Trees: How We Can Reforest Our World

“Tim Lenton from the University of East Anglia told the Cambridge meeting: “We are close to being committed to a collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, but we don’t think we have passed the tipping point yet.” How long have we got? Maybe less than a decade.”
― Fred Pearce, With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change