Environment Quotes

In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.

~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt

If you can't reuse or repair an item, do you ever really own it? Do you ever really own it? Do you ever develop the sense of pride and proprietorship that comes from maintaining an object in fine working order?We invest something of ourselves in our material world, which in turn reflects who we are. In the era of disposability that plastic has helped us foster, we have increasingly invested ourselves in objects that have no real meaning in our lives. We think of disposable lighters as conveniences -- which they indisputably are; ask any smoker or backyard-barbecue chef -- and yet we don't think much about the tradeoffs that that convenience entails.

~ Susan Freinkel

Long dismissed as children's stories or 'myths' by Westerners, Australian Aboriginal stories have only recently begun to be taken seriously for what they are: the longest continuous record of historic events and spirituality in the world.

~ Karl-Erik Sveiby

Compared to forest or aquatic ecosystems, grassland is unstable. It requires rather precise geological and climatic conditions, and if these conditions are not maintained--if too much rain falls, or too little--it quickly turns into forest or desert, both of which are dominated by woody plants. This instability is reflected in the spectacular but brief careers of various grassland faunas. Humanity, with its dazzling symbioses, preadaptations, and neoteny, is the most spectacular of these--and may well be the briefest.

~ David Rains Wallace

The Everglades was the only place on earth where alligators (broad snout, fresh water, darker skin) and crocodiles (pointy snout, salt water, toothy grin) lived side by side. It was the only home of the Everglades mink, Okeechobee gourd, and Big Cypress fox squirrel. It had carnivorous plants, amphibious birds, oysters that grew on trees, cacti that grew in water, lizards that changed colors, and fish that changed genders. It had 1,100 species of trees and plants, 350 birds, and 52 varieties of porcelain-smooth, candy-striped tree snails. It had bottlenose dolphins, marsh rabbits, ghost orchids, moray eels, bald eagles, and countless other species that didn't seem to belong on the same continent, much less in the same ecosystem.

~ Michael Grunwald

The river of his youth had been diverted and poured out broadly across the land to seep through dirt to the roots of crops instead of running in its bed. The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert. Nothing was as it had been. He knew what had happened to the sagelands. He himself had helped burn them. Then men like his father had seized the river without a trace of evil in their hearts, sure of themselves but ignorant, and children of their time entirely, with no other bearings to rely on. Irrigators and fruit-tree growers, they believed the river to be theirs. His own life spanned that time and this, and so he believed in the old fast river as much as he believed in apple orchards, and yet he saw that the two were at odds, the river defeated that apples might grow as far as Royal Slope. It made no more sense to love the river and at the same time kill it growing apples than it made sense to love small birds on the wing and shoot them over pointing dogs. But he'd come into the world in another time, a time immune to these contradictions and in the end he couldn't shake old ways any more than he could shake his name.

~ David Guterson

Though this new forest grew mightily, elsewhere the mighty jungles fell. Elsewhere the coastal rain forests that furred the body of the world were torn and riven. Elsewhere the last of the old growth the last of the world’s own garment were ripped away. It was in this time, now, that the mother of us all was stripped naked and left to die in shame of her children, she who had been robed in glory like this, adorned like this. I bent my head upon the roots and wept, sorrowing for the trees.

~ Sheri S. Tepper

Pages could be written on the immense losses of productive soil that occur annually in almost every continent of the earth; on lethal air pollution episodes in major urban areas; on the worldwide distribution of toxic agents, such as radioactive isotopes and lead; on the chemicalization of man's immediate environment-- one might say his very dinner table—with pesticide residues and food additives. Pieced together like bits of a jigsaw puzzle, these affronts to the environment form a pattern of destruction that has no precedent in man's long history on earth.

~ Murray Bookchin

In this century wars will not be fought over oil, as in the past, but over water. The situation is becoming desperate. The world's water is strained by population growth. There is no more fresh water on earth than two thousand years ago when the population was three percent of its current size. Even without the inevitable droughts, like the current one, it will get worse as demand and pollution increase. Some countries will simply run out of water, sparking a global refugee crisis. Tens of millions of people will flood across international borders. It means the collapse of fisheries, environmental destruction, conflict, lower living standards. She paused for a moment. As people who deal with the ocean you must see the irony. We are facing a shortage on a planet whose surface is covered two-thirds with water.

~ Clive Cussler

Destroying the joint means building a new system in which it is not OK to allow people to be marginalised, exploited and discriminated against, it's not OK to ignore the needs of future generations, it's not OK to wreck this extraordinary, beautiful, fragile planetary environment that sustains us - our Mother Earth.

~ Christine Milne

Where there is a smoke, there is an ecologist.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Selling cakes and pies to raise money for research into cancer or any other health related issue, is like selling meat at a campaign to raise awareness about the environment.

~ Mango Wodzak

Clean communities, crystal clear coastal waters

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Find the environment that best suits what lifestyle is required.

~ Steven Redhead

Even in the pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet 'virtuous,' when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - become a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.

~ Michael Pollan

There are always ways to control your environment.

~ Steven Redhead

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

~ Adlai Stevenson

You're either for the environment or against the environment.

~ Mommy Moo Moo

The name Matthew means gift of Yahweh. Saint Matthew was one of the twelve apostles and he was a tax collector. Hurricane Matthew just delivered us a gift from God and collected taxes for our abysmal management of Mother Earth.

~ Mommy Moo Moo

Mother Nature is challenging enough, let's keep oil drilling out of the picture.

~ Mommy Moo Moo

When the productive lands lose their essence, our productive lives shall least have essence!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Lightworkers and holistic leaders who are afraid to voice their opinions on global events, this I say to you: Whether it is for the environment or human rights, it is time for lightworkers to get off the bench. There is too much at risk to worry about risking a sale. This is why we are here.

~ Eileen Anglin

At this point, I want to say point-blank what I hope is already clear: though agrarianism proposes that everybody has agrarian responsibilities, it does not propose that everybody should be a farmer or that we do not need cities. Nor does it propose that every product be a necessity. Furthermore, any thinkable human economy would have to grant to manufacturing an appropriate and honorable place. Agrarians would insist only that any manufacturing enterprise should be formed and scaled to fit the local landscape, the local ecosystem, and the local community, and that it should be locally owned and employ local people. They would insist, in other words, that the shop or factory owner should not be an outsider, but rather a sharer in the fate of the place and the community. The deciders should live with the results of their decisions.

~ Wendell Berry

Create an environment to grow consistently and to influence everyone around you positively. Your future doesn’t have to equal your past. You are designed to achieve greatness, to be happy and to live the life you deserve. Start with setting a P.O.S.I.T.I.V.E. Goal.™

~ Farshad Asl

The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind.

~ Aldo Leopold

Trust the horticulturalist: California's genius may be green, but it's underlying beauty is brown.

~ Jared Farmer

There are some things in the world we can't change - gravity, entropy, the speed of light, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and well being. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere.

~ David Suzuki

Surround yourself with everything and everyone that will help you feel your best, think your best, do your best, and be your best.

~ Farshad Asl

Your environment plays a key factor in living a fulfilled life. In order to bear fruit, gain fulfillment, and meet fruition, you must intentionally create an environment that will sustain you.

~ Farshad Asl

Be prepared to change yourself if you think there is a need to change your environment.

~ Eraldo Banovac

...environment scarcely recognises a political frontier.

~ T.c. Smout

...no other life form needed man, man needed all the others in which to survive.

~ Barry Babcock

I simply feel that now we've so utterly perfected the walkie-talkie to the point where it has become the iPhone, maybe we could turn the great minds that brought us the Nintendo Wii, to, say, getting fresh water to the one billion people on our planet who don't have it.

~ Colin Beavan

The stranger smiled at her. Humanity has found a cure to a disease they never new existed.

~ Jeyn Roberts

The senior British economic thinker on climate, Sir Nicholas Stern, has estimated that if we don't reverse climate change, the costs of dealing with the resulting catastrophe would be as much as twenty percent of the world's Gross Domestic Product. He's saying that if we do nothing about climate change, then we will have to spend a full fifth of our planet's economic energy on dealing with the floods, hurricanes, droughts, food shortages, and epidemics that will result.

~ Colin Beavan

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food packaging makes up twenty percent of our solid waste nationwide.

~ Colin Beavan

Early accounts of the abundance of fish and wildlife offer us a window to the past that helps reveal the magnitude of subsequent declines. They provide us with benchmarks against which we can compare the condition of today's seas. Such benchmarks are valuable in countering the phenomenon of shifting environmental baselines, whereby each generation comes to view the environment into which it was born as natural, or normal. Shifting environmental baselines cause a collective societal amnesia in which gradual deterioration of the environment and depletion of wildlife populations pass almost unnoticed. Our expectations diminish with time, and with them goes our will to do something about the losses.

~ Callum Roberts

When discharging industrial gas into the indoor environment in high altitude astronomy, we never wore breathing respirators that fed us oxygenated air at above the legally required 19.5% oxygen levels.

~ Steven Magee

When I worked in astronomy, I routinely observed young college and university students working with liquid nitrogen and breathing nitrogen gas as they discharged it into the indoor environment at high altitude.

~ Steven Magee

Astronomy staff that routinely discharged industrial gas into the indoor environment at high altitudes did not wear oxygen deficiency monitors or protective breathing respirators.

~ Steven Magee