Time & Perspective Quote by Peter Knights

“We cannot afford” frames extinction as a ledger item: not just tragic, but ruinously expensive. Peter Knights, an activist whose career sits in the contemporary conservation-industrial ecosystem of NGOs, donors, and policy campaigns, reaches for the language that moves institutions. “Afford” is a deliberate bridge between ecology and economics, aimed at audiences who might tune out pure moral appeals but will lean in when risk, cost, and liability enter the chat. It’s persuasion by pragmatic alarm.

The second sentence pivots from budget math to civic duty. “Responsibility” recruits the listener into a collective “we,” flattening distinctions between governments, corporations, and individuals. That’s strategic. Activism often fails when blame becomes a dead end; this line reroutes blame into obligation and, ideally, action. It also lightly side-steps the most combustible question in environmental politics - who, specifically, caused the damage and who pays to fix it - by distributing accountability broadly.

“Protect and preserve” reads like a paired slogan: protect implies active defense against threats (poaching, deforestation, extraction), preserve signals restraint, a willingness to leave value untapped. The phrase “natural world” remains intentionally expansive, more spiritual than scientific, letting biodiversity, climate stability, and aesthetic wonder all sit under one umbrella without getting bogged down in metrics.

“Future generations” is the ethical trump card. It invokes a constituency that cannot vote, donate, or protest, which makes the appeal hard to dismiss without sounding callous. Subtext: the window to act is narrowing, and history is keeping receipts.