Ethiopia is the center of origin and diversity for the majority of coffee we drink. The commodification of coffee pushes farmers to grow as much as possible by whatever means possible. This has contributed to deforestation. The place where coffee was born - the area with the greatest biodiversity of coffee anywhere in the world - could disappear. No forest, no coffee. No coffee, no forest. What we lose isn't specific to Ethiopia; it impacts us all.

~ Preeti Simran Sethi

Preeti Simran Sethi Biodiversity Coffee Deforestation Ethiopia Food

Nearly every historic fruit and vegetable variety once found in the United States has disappeared.

~ Preeti Simran Sethi

Preeti Simran Sethi Biodiversity Food United States

Taste” is a noun and a verb: We all have it and we all do it. But we don’t all have a language or a system for understanding and expressing that experience… I knew chocolate was something I didn’t want to lose, but I didn’t have the words to communicate why it was so important to me, or the knowledge on how best to save it. Now I do.

~ Simran Sethi

Simran Sethi Biodiversity Chocolate Food Science

Lack of accountability weakens the environmental and health rights of citizens; it damages peace- building and reconciliation initiatives; impedes the implementation of global health policies; leads to the loss of ecosystems and biodiversity; and weakens democracy, justice, human rights, and international security.

~ Widad Akreyi

Widad Akreyi Accountability Biodiversity Conflicts Ecosystems Environment Environmental Protection Human Rights International Security Justice Military Peace Public Health War Widad Akrawi

Dams also tend to be built in remote areas which are the last refuge for species that have been displaced by development in other regions.

~ Patrick Mccully

Patrick Mccully Animals Biodiversity Biology Dams Ecology Endangered Species Wildlife

The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data...which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data.

~ Freeman Dyson

Freeman Dyson Animals Biodiversity Biology Biosphere Data Dna Dna Sequencing Genome Information Nature Plants Sequencing Wonder

Excessive gentrification destroys the biodiversity and ecosystem of a community.

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

Khang Kijarro Nguyen Biodiversity Community Destruction Ecosystem Gentrification

A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.

~ Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson Biodiversity Biology Microcosms Natural History

Biodiversity starts in the distant past and it points toward the future.

~ Frans Lanting

Frans Lanting Past Biodiversity Toward