quotations about environment
Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.
DAVID EHRENFELD
The Arrogance of Humanism
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. In a war such as this, then, what is victory and how will we recognize it?
AL GORE
Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit
I don't mean to imply that we are in imminent danger of being wiped off the face of the earth - at least, not on account of global warming. But climate change does confront us with profound new realities. We face these new realities as a nation, as members of the world community, as consumers, as producers, and as investors. And unless we do a better job of adjusting to these new realities, we will pay a heavy price. We may not suffer the fate of the dinosaurs. But there will be a toll on our environment and on our economy, and the toll will rise higher with each new generation.
EILEEN CLAUSSEN
speech, July 17, 2002
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
We line up and make a lot of noise about big environmental problems like incinerators, waste dumps, acid rain, global warming and pollution. But we don't understand that when we add up all the tiny environmental problems each of us creates, we end up with those big environmental dilemmas. Humans are content to blame someone else, like government or corporations, for the messes we create, and yet we each continue doing the same things, day in and day out, that have created the problems. Sure, corporations create pollution. If they do, don't buy their products. If you have to buy their products (gasoline for example), keep it to a minimum. Sure, municipal waste incinerators pollute the air. Stop throwing trash away. Minimize your production of waste. Recycle. Buy food in bulk and avoid packaging waste. Simplify. Turn off your TV. Grow your own food. Make compost. Plant a garden. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If you don't, who will?
JOSEPH JENKINS
The Humanure Handbook
The dinosaurs disappeared because they could not adapt to their changing environment. We shall disappear if we cannot adapt to an environment that now contains spaceships, computers -- and thermonuclear weapons.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
foreword, Collected Stories
The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature--nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing.
LOUDON WAINWRIGHT
attributed, The Greatest Quotations of All Time
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.
ANTON CHEKHOV
Uncle Vanya
A strong, successful man is not the victim of his environment. He creates favorable conditions. His own inherent force and energy compel things to turn out as he desires. But a weak man is the victim of outside influences.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Progressive Business Man
We cannot permit the environmental movement to shut down the United States. We cannot shut down the lives of many Americans by going to the extreme on the environment.
GEORGE BUSH
campaign rally, May 30, 1992
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.
GIL STERN
attributed, The Harper Book of Quotations
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
stand-up routine
If you really think the environment is less important than the economy try holding your breathe while you count your money.
ANONYMOUS
I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use.
MOTHER TERESA
attributed, The Carbon Efficient City
While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil. Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
attributed, Land Use
What people have begun to appreciate over the last 20 or 30 years is that the environment is, like a bathtub, of limited capacity. When humans were launched into space in the late 1960s, they -- and then we -- were for the first time able to view the planet Earth as a blue globe, utterly bounded in extent, moving in the infinite and hostile darkness of space. The limits of the environment became immediately clear.
NICHOLAS LOW
The Green City
I'm a product of my environment
My vocabulary's like licking the gutter
CIRCLE JERKS
"Product of My Environment"
When the well's dry, we know the worth of water.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
The environment is the infrastructure of our communities. As a nation, as a civilization, it's our obligation to create communities for our children that provide them with opportunities for dignity and good health. When we destroy nature, we diminish ourselves and impoverish our children. We ignore that at our own peril.
BOBBY KENNEDY
O Magazine, Feb. 2007
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
The Dispossessed