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Environmental Quotes
Thank
God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~Henry
David Thoreau
The sun,
the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they
happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands. ~Havelock
Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923
There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's
greed. ~Mohandas K. Gandhi
There's so
much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be
no place to put it all. ~Robert Orben
It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the
Alaskan oil spill. It was yours. ~Greenpeace advertisement, New York
Times, 25 February 1990
Modern
technology
Owes ecology
An apology.
~Alan M. Eddison
In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave
the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. ~Paul Brooks,
The Pursuit of Wilderness, 1971
Don't blow
it - good planets are hard to find. ~Quoted in Time
Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.
~William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990
When a man
throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a
fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly
rewarded. ~Pat Brown, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising,
1985
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget
us. ~Henrik Tikkanen
I'm not an
environmentalist. I'm an Earth warrior. ~Darryl Cherney, quoted in
Smithsonian, April 1990
I think the environment should be put in the category of our national
security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense
abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend? ~Robert Redford, Yosemite
National Park dedication, 1985
Let us a
little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own
affairs than we. ~Michel de Montaigne, translated
We never know the worth of water till the well is dry. ~Thomas Fuller,
Gnomologia, 1732
Your
grandchildren will likely find it incredible - or even sinful - that you
burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes! ~Paul
MacCready, Jr.
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our
children. ~Native American Proverb
There are
no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. ~Marshall McLuhan,
1964
Newspapers: dead trees with information smeared on them. ~Horizon,
"Electronic Frontier"
They kill
good trees to put out bad newspapers. ~James G. Watt, quoted in
Newsweek, 8 March 1982
I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's
energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy
centuries ago. ~Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26
August 1973
The use of
solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own
the sun. ~Ralph Nader, quoted in Linda Botts, ed., Loose Talk,
1980
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When
we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with
love and respect. ~Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
The earth
we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their
revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.
~Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958
The packaging for a microwavable "microwave" dinner is programmed for a
shelf life of maybe six months, a cook time of two minutes and a landfill
dead-time of centuries. ~David Wann, Buzzworm, November 1990
So bleak
is the picture... that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out
to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century. ~Philip
Shabecoff, New York Times Magazine, 4 June 1978
Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress. ~John Clapham,
A Concise Economic History of Britain, 1957
And Man
created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane
wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take
his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that
which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that which had no
further use. And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags and
aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was
nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried: "Look at
this Godawful mess." ~Art Buchwald, 1970
The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the
world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those
hands are sharp elbows. ~Paul A. Samuelson, Newsweek, 12 June 1967
Suburbia
is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets
after them. ~Bill Vaughn
For 200 years we've been conquering Nature. Now we're beating it to
death. ~Tom McMillan, quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap,
1990
If
civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the
Wastepaper Age. ~Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect, 1959
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent
less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her
sweetness and respecting her seniority. ~Elwyn Brooks White, Essays of
E.B. White, 1977
The
insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made
solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been
set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages. ~Savinien
de Cyrano de Bergerac, États et empires de la lune, 1656
Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature,
yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work. ~Pliny the Elder,
The Natural History, translated by Philemon Holland
Oh
Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
~George Carlin
A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a
bigger father with a bigger fist. If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad
ignores your prayers, it's taken personally. Hear only silence long
enough, and you start wondering about his power. His fairness. His very
existence. But if a world mother doesn't reply, Her excuse is simple.
She never claimed conceited omnipotence. She has countless others
clinging to her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak
for themselves. To Her elder offspring She says - go raid the fridge. Go
play outside. Go get a job. Or, better yet, lend me a hand. I have no
time for idle whining. ~David Brin
Why do
people give each other flowers? To celebrate various important occasions,
they're killing living creatures? Why restrict it to plants?
"Sweetheart, let's make up. Have this deceased squirrel." ~The
Washington Post
Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against
his own nature. ~Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1964
When you
defile the pleasant streams
And the wild bird's abiding place,
You massacre a million dreams
And cast your spittle in God's face.
~John Drinkwater
A virgin forest is where the hand of man has never set foot. ~Author
Unknown
When a man
says to me, "I have the intensest love of nature," at once I know that he
has none. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1857
I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead,
few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn. ~Author Unknown
When we
heal the earth, we heal ourselves. ~David Orr
We cannot command Nature except by obeying her. ~Francis Bacon
There is
nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they
can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before. ~Robert Lynd,
The Blue Lion and Other Essays
Will
urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature?
Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is
a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a
rat - glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only
tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades
his gifts on Christmas morning? ~Frank N. Ikard, North American Wildlife
and Natural Resources Conference, Houston, March 1968
How long
can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements,
breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with
hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only
machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? ~Charles A.
Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, November 1939
It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that
a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without
generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water
- and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves
and blood. ~Bernand De Voto, Fortune, June 1947
Take care
of the earth and she will take care of you. ~Author Unknown
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. ~Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr.
Something
will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining
wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned
into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few
remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we
pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our
paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will
Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the
stinks of human and automotive waste. ~Wallace Stegner, letter to David
E. Pesonen of the Wildland Research Center, 3 December 1960 (Thanks,
Bekah)
Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains,
and atomies infinity. ~E. Knight
Opie, you
haven't finished your milk. We can't put it back in the cow, you know.
~Aunt Bee Taylor, The Andy Griffith Show
The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is
the man who cleans up the river. ~Ross Perot
Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere. ~Richard
Bach
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the
environment. ~Ansel Adams
We say we
love flowers, yet we pluck them. We say we love trees, yet we cut them
down. And people still wonder why some are afraid when told they are
loved. ~Author Unknown
Take nothing but pictures.
Leave nothing but footprints.
Kill nothing but time.
~Motto of the Baltimore Grotto, a caving society
Why should
man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he
shows no mercy to what is under him? ~Pierre Troubetzkoy
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. ~Richard P. Feynman
Humankind
has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever
we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All
things connect. ~Chief Seattle, 1855
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the
rest of the world. ~John Muir
You forget
that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.
~Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes,
1755
Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their
operations.
~David Gerrold
Man has
lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying
the earth. ~Albert Schweitzer, quoted in James Brabazon, Albert
Schweitzer
The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted
children. ~Paul R. Ehrlich
Man is a
blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon
the earth. ~Ian McHarg
Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values.... God
made life simple. It is man who complicates it. ~Charles A. Lindbergh,
Reader's Digest, July 1972
The
control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over
himself. ~Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart away from nature
becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon
led to lack of respect for humans too. ~Chief Luther Standing Bear
The
magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature - nothing is safe from
the idiot marks of man's passing. ~Loudon Wainwright
Every day is Earth Day. ~Author Unknown
Remember
when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust? ~Lane
Olinghouse
Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws you are
your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman. ~Luther Burbank
Dig a
trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like
geographical strata or layers of cake.... During a recent landfill dig in
Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you
might read one over breakfast. ~William Rathje, The Economist, 8
September 1990
Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only
safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles
away. ~Stephanie Mills, ed., In Praise of Nature, 1990
How can
the spirit of the earth like the white man?... Everywhere the white man
has touched it, it is sore. ~Anonymous Wintu Woman
Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves
as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the
brain, we are a cancer on nature. ~Dave Foreman, Harper's, April
1990
The
universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
~Carl Sagan
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and
poetry, and all that is spiritual. ~John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney,
19 September 1871
Every
creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he
who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.
~Henry David Thoreau, "Chesuncook," The Maine Woods, 1848
Man maketh a death which Nature never made. ~Edward Young
It is a
curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be
threatened by the activities of one form of that life. ~Rachel Carson
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner
of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to
similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like
locusts. ~Mahatma Gandhi
It is the
safest of times, it is the riskiest of times.... What the Dickens is going
on here? ~Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology, and risk, quoted in
National Academy of Sciences, Improving Risk Communication, 1989
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die. ~Gil
Stern
Human
consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock.
Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant
perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we
are still in the early morning of our April day. ~Stephen Jay Gould, "Our
Allotted Lifetimes," The Panda's Thumb, 1980
Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind. ~David Ehrenfeld,
The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978
The
American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps
the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality.... Whole
forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality.
~Irving Babbitt
Drive Nature forth by force, she'll turn and rout
The false refinements that would keep her out.
~Horace, Odes
Nature
always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the
same place. ~Rene Dubos, Medical Utopias, 1961
In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the
development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment.
~Richard Wilkinson
Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of
Americans as having a higher [quality of life] not because of what it has,
but rather because of what it does not have! ~Don A. Dillman, Annals
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1977
We have been god-like in the planned breeding of our domesticated plants,
but rabbit-like in the unplanned breeding of ourselves. ~Arnold Toynbee
Human
destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time
and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back. ~Rene Dubos,
Mirage of Health, 1959
Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well
become the great scarcities of tomorrow. ~Edwin Way Teale, Autumn
Across America, 1956
Waste is a
tax on the whole people. ~Albert W. Atwood
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man
and nature. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
The rose
has thorns only for those who would gather it. ~Chinese Proverb
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on
silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase
noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation,
meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling,
grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His
inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. ~Jean Arp
We shall
require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
~Albert Einstein
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can
add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only
a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become
extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every
day. ~Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 1897
A human
being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in
time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as
something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his
consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us
to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle
of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in
its beauty. ~Albert Einstein, 1950
A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things - including
man. All life forms obey Nature's demands - except man, who has found
ways of ignoring them. ~Eugene M. Poirot, Our Margin of Life, 1978
When you
use a manual push mower, you're "cutting" down on pollution and the only
thing in danger of running out of gas is you! ~Grey Livingston
After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a
material world. ~Pam Shaw
As we
watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the
poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously
whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet
to say about us: "With all their genius and with all their skill, they
ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, "They went
on playing politics until their world collapsed around them." ~U Thant,
speech, 1970
The command "Be fruitful and multiply" was promulgated, according to our
authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people.
~William Ralph Inge, More Lay Thoughts of a Dean, 1931
Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, was a major factor in the
development of the Western worldview.... A basic Christian belief was that
God gave humans dominion over creation, with the freedom to use the
environment as they saw fit. Another important Judeo-Christian belief
predicted that God would bring a cataclysmic end to the Earth sometime in
the future. One interpretation of this belief is that the Earth is only a
temporary way station on the soul's journey to the afterlife. Because
these beliefs tended to devalue the natural world, they fostered attitudes
and behaviors that had a negative effect on the environment. ~Donald G.
Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global
Environment, 1996
For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now
subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of
conception until death. ~Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
I realized
that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things.
Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a
horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith,
looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the
East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an
expression of the unity and harmony of the universe. ~William O. Douglas,
Go East, Young Man, 1974
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would
regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand
years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into
chaos. ~Edward O. Wilson
Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian
scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be
reburied so often cannot be entirely dead. ~Herman E. Daly,
Steady-State Economics, 1977
The human race will be the cancer of the planet. ~Julian Huxley,
attributed
Man will survive as a species for one reason: He
can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology
and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise
of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the
ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.
~René Dubos, quoted in Life, 28 July 1970
One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward
I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution
for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health
considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.
~Glenn T. Seaborg, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, speech, Argonne
National Laboratory, 1969
Our children may save us if they are taught to care
properly for the planet; but if not, it may be back to the Ice Age or the
caves from where we first emerged. Then we'll have to view the universe
above from a cold, dark place. No more jet skis, nuclear weapons, plastic
crap, broken pay phones, drugs, cars, waffle irons, or television. Come
to think of it, that might not be a bad idea. ~Jimmy Buffet, Mother
Earth News, March-April 1990
Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common
denominator in our exploitative economic system. ~Channing E. Phillips,
speech, Washington, D.C., 22 April 1970
The days a man spends fishing or spends hunting
should not be deducted from the time that he's on earth. In other words,
if I fish today, that should be added to the amount of time I get to
live. That's the way I look at recreation. That's why I'll be a big
conservation, environmental President, because I plan to fish and hunt as
much as I possibly can. ~George Bush, quoted in Los Angeles Times,
30 December 1988
The desire to build a risk-free society has always been a sign of
decadence. It has meant that the nation has given up, that it no longer
believes in its destiny, that it has ceased to aspire to greatness, and
has retired from history to pet itself. ~Henry Fairlie, quoted in
Conservation Foundation Letter, November 1981
The exquisite sight, sound, and smell of wilderness
is many times more powerful if it is earned through physical achievement,
if it comes at the end of a long and fatiguing trip for which vigorous
good health is necessary. Practically speaking, this means that no one
should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means. ~Garrett
Hardin, The Ecologist, February 1974
The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more
difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is
with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as
allies. ~Al Gore
Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. But
teach a man how to fish, and he'll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of
three years. ~Charles Haas
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the
ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your
children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your
children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother.
Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit
upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. ~Native American Wisdom
The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends
to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with
technology. ~E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973
The tourist business is a trap, it is a tained honey;
Man clearly should have stayed in bed, and not invented money.
~Kenneth E. Boulding, "The Ballad of Ecological Awareness," in M. Taghi
Farvar and John P. Milton, eds., The Careless Technology, 1972
There is hope if people will begin to awaken that
spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are
caretakers of this planet. ~Brooke Medicine Eagle
This is a beautiful planet and not at all fragile. Earth can withstand
significant volcanic eruptions, tectonic cataclysms, and ice ages. But
this canny, intelligent, prolific, and extremely self-centered human
creature had proven himself capable of more destruction of life than
Mother Nature herself.... We've got to be stopped. ~Michael L. Fischer,
Harper's, July 1990
Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love"
them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live
normal lives, love them more. ~Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons,
1953
To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the
midst of abundance. ~Buddha
To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin
and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness,
will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity
which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
~Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907
Today's world is one in which the age-old risks of humankind - the
drought, floods, communicable diseases - are less of a problem than ever
before. They have been replaced by risks of humanity's own making - the
unintended side-effects of beneficial technologies and the intended
effects of the technologies of war. Society must hope that the world's
ability to assess and manage risks will keep pace with its ability to
create them. ~J. Clarence Davies, quoted in Conservation Foundation,
State of the Environment: An Assessment at Mid-Decade, 1984
U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough
aluminum to rebuild the commercial air fleet every three months; enough
iron and steel to continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill
New York's World Trade Center every two weeks. ~Environmental Defense
Fund advertisement, Christian Science Monitor, 1990
Water flows uphill towards money. ~Anonymous, saying in the American
West, quoted by Ivan Doig in Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986
Living in the midst of abundance we have the
greatest difficulty in seeing that the supply of natural wealth is limited
and that the constant increase of population is destined to reduce the
American standard of living unless we deal more sanely with our
resources. ~W.H. Carothers
We have always had reluctance to see a tract of land which is empty of men
as anything but a void. The "waste howling wilderness" of Deuteronomy is
typical. The Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as wild or uncultivated
land which is occupied "only" by wild animals. Places not used by us are
"wastes." Areas not occupied by us are "desolate." Could the desolation
be in the soul of man? ~John A. Livingston, in Borden Spears, ed.,
Wilderness Canada, 1970
We must not be forced to explore the universe in
search of a new home because we have made the Earth inhospitable, even
uninhabitable. For if we do not solve the environmental and related
social problems that beset us on Earth - pollution, toxic contamination,
resource depletion, prejudice, poverty, hunger - those problems will
surely accompany us to other worlds. ~Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M.
Franz, Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment, 1996
Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes,
running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime
pits, and debris. ~Edward Abbey
We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic
crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for
existence save to serve man. ~Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of
Our Ecologic Crisis," 1967
The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic
revolution in the history of our culture. By destroying pagan animism,
Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference
to the feelings of natural objects. ~Lynn I. White, Jr., Science,
10 March 1967
The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three
hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory. ~René
Dubos, The Wooing of Earth, 1980
We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the
projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological
collapse of the planet. ~Jeremy Rifkin, World Press Review, 30
December 1989
Western society has accepted as unquestionable a
technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive
taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create
technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these
novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect
to their human consequences. ~Lewis Mumford
When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a
vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a
sportsman. ~Joseph Wood Krutch
When some high-sounding institute states that a
compound is harmless or a process free of risk, it is wise to know whence
the institute or the scientists who work there obtain their financial
support. ~Lancet, editorial on the "medical-industrial complex,"
1973
When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.... When we build houses, we
make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin
things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don't chop down the
trees. ~Wintu Indian, quoted in Julian Burger, The Gaia Atlas of First
Peoples, 1990
We have to shift our emphasis from economic
efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to
healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems. ~Janet
Holmes à Court
With laissez-faire and price atomic,
Ecology's Uneconomic,
But with another kind of logic
Economy's Unecologic.
~Kenneth E. Boulding, in Frank F. Darling and John P. Milton, eds.,
Future Environments of North America, 1966
You go into a community and they will vote 80
percent to 20 percent in favor of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask
them to devote 20 minutes a year to having their car emissions inspected,
they will vote 80 to 20 against it. We are a long way in this country
from taking individual responsibility for the environmental problem.
~William D. Ruckelshaus, former EPA administrator, New York Times,
30 November 1988
Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals
once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature
were pursued, we would need no zoos at all. ~Michael Fox, Sierra,
November-December 1990
Loyd: "It has to do with keeping things in balance. It's like the
spirits have made a deal with us. We're on our own. The spirits have
been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're
saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we
appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up
anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good
guests."
Codi: "Like a note you'd send somebody after you'd stayed in their
house?"
Loyd: "Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I
took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry,
I hope it wasn't your favorite one.'"
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American
enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of
amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming
the land could also forget what had been done to it. ~Barbara Kingsolver,
Animal Dreams
In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water;
in a developed country, don't breathe the air. ~Changing Times
magazine
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