Art & Creativity Quote by Ken Thompson

There is a quiet kind of ambition in Thompson's line: not the grandstanding of a manifesto, but the calibrated pressure of a scientist trying to smuggle urgency into the plainest possible sentence. "I also have an idea" is doing social work. It sounds modest, almost offhand, the way academics often preface something that is actually a call to arms. That soft opening lowers defenses, positioning the book as a contribution to an ongoing conversation rather than a scold.

Then the phrase pivots: "biodiversity" names the topic in institutional, policy-ready language, while "why and how we should be conserving it" drags the reader from description into prescription. The pairing of why and how is the giveaway to his intent. He is not just arguing that biodiversity matters (the emotional, moral, and economic case), but anticipating the common stall point: even people who agree in principle often don't know what action looks like at the level of cities, farms, gardens, and governance. The sentence is a bridge between expertise and agency.

The subtext is also a critique of how conservation debates get stuck. "Why" acknowledges that the public still needs convincing against short-term incentives and political fatigue; "how" admits that guilt and awe are insufficient without workable steps. Coming from a scientist born in 1943, it carries the generational weight of someone who has watched the baseline shift in real time, and who understands that the "book" is not just a product but a last-mile delivery system for evidence, framed as something people can actually use.