Environment Quotes

Two hundred years after Euro-Americans discovered it, America's river west begins and ends at pollution.

~ Bill Lambrecht

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it.

~ Gloria Steinem

For most people the environment controls them rather than being in full control of experiences.

~ Steven Redhead

Save this gift given to us.

~ Eileen Anglin

Is it really over? Kurlansky lamented over the dry-docked Massachusetts cod fishermen at the conclusion of his moving, epic book. Are these the last gatherers of food from the wild to be phased out? Is this the last of wild food? Is our last physical tie to untamed nature to become an obscure delicacy like the occasional pheasant?These words stayed with me over the years to come. But histories of environmental wrong doing have a strange way of putting traumatic events in the past, sealing off bad human behavior of former times from the unwritten pages of the present and the future.

~ Paul Greenberg

If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

~ James Lovelock

I don’t know why we keep building these fucking dams,” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something. . . . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.

~ Douglas Adams

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

~ Edward Abbey

The world doesn't need more people to save the world, what it really needs is more people to kick asses of those who pollute.

~ Everskeptic

What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps '“baffling'” would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, and I can'’t help but wonder why. I'’m convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It'’s the only explanation that makes sense.

~ Douglas Adams

Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.

~ Vandana Shiva

We can and must respond creatively to the triple crisis and simultaneously overcome dehumanization, economic inequality, and, ecological catastrophe.

~ Vandana Shiva

Surround yourself with people who move you, motivate you and mobilize you.

~ Tony Curl

There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves.

~ Tim Winton

A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening -- as the five of us did -- it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold. [1971]

~ John Mcphee

This is one of the greatest challenges of our time: to convert ourselves to a type of development that knows how to respect creation.

~ Pope Francis

The scandal with the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea is how it managed to obtain a construction permit to build a manned telescope in a known biologically toxic environment to workers. How many more people need to die, get injured or develop long term very high altitude sickness that will last a lifetime?

~ Steven Magee

When we are in a wrong environment, we feel so paranoid, yet unwilling to move out. There's no need for pussyfooting, we got to release our poisonous fluid and scream aloud, storming  out of the show like a radical.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

The fish, whose tail was nipped, separated itself from the group and began to appear sickly, most likely from stress, Coal reasoned. He refused to be this fish, or the belly up fish, or the blue fish gasping for air. Rather, he resolved to be the other fish, the one who found purpose and meaning despite the unnatural environment, despite depending upon keepers for survival.

~ Jesikah Sundin

I remember standing in the bush above this unbelievably wild river, and thinking this is as good as it gets. Exquisite birdsong, jagged peaks of the Alps beckoning like the spires of mystical cathedrals, the smell of moisture in the beech forest like an elixir. Nature in its raw, unpredictable state – at an entirely different end of the spectrum from the confines of a test tube or comfort of a biotech lab.

~ Geoffrey Robert

People who have metal implants should be familiar with the symptoms of radio wave sickness and should keep their environment free of wireless radiation producing products.

~ Steven Magee

Carson was persuaded that many experts either failed to recognize or chose to ignore the potential hazards of pesticides. She was convinced that the weight of her scientific evidence would defeat the skeptics among them. And once the public had the necessary information, citizens could make informed decisions about what Carson believed was a matter of life and death.

~ Mark H. Lytle

She could not be silent even if the men of science, many of them smug experts in white lab coats who promised “better living through chemistry,” dismissed her warnings as feminine hysteria.

~ Mark H. Lytle

We still talk in terms of conquest,” she observed. “We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.” Without hesitating, she delivered her final blow: “I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.

~ Mark H. Lytle

Sky is grey, vegetation is plastic, and mankind is pale, for we have spent our days conceiving unnecessary tools for our arousal, and so we hide the nakedness of nature with brutal machinnes.

~ Shawn Lukas

Most police cars are the equivalent of an electrical room on wheels and it does not surprise me that police officers that spend time in such a biologically toxic environment are displaying aggression.

~ Steven Magee

There's only three things you need to do when you are finished editing your book - Sleep! Sleep! and Sleep!

~ A. Louise Robertson

As the stewards of creation, what account will the Human Race be able to give of our Stewardship?

~ D. Denise Dianaty

Everywhere my feet have touched on this planet has been magic, why cant others see it this way?

~ Mary-Ellen Peters

We have, as a nation, made choices that by all reasonable expectations should have put us in harm's way. There is little doubt that we continue to make choices that are likely to make the danger even greater. And yet, by dint of an accident of geography and economics, we have so far been spared the worst consequences of our actions. And even as those consequences begin to take hold in other places, here, in the parts of America where most of us live, at least for the moment, we can hear the winds roaring over our heads like that coal train, but somehow the worst of the danger still seems removed. What is our responsibility? (164)

~ Seamus Mcgraw

Deciding we won't drive to that chain grocery store and buy that imported pineapple is a path to liberation. Deciding to walk to the farmers' market and buy fresh, local peas is like spitting in the eye of the industries that control us. Every act of refusal is also an act of assent. Every time we way no to consumer culture, we say yes to something more beautiful and sustaining. Life is not something we go through or that happens to us; it's something we create by our own decisions.

~ Kathleen Dean Moore

We are the last generation with a real opportunity to save the world.

~ Laurence Overmire

Environment' is a term that creates no pictures in the mind, which is why I have begun to use 'natural world' or 'living planet' instead.

~ George Monbiot

Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.

~ Elizabeth Kolbert

There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn't exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats.

~ Don Delillo

You’re talking about gold and silver, cash and securities. I’m talking about the sheer beauty of the land, the value of unpolluted parkland made wild and staying wild forever.

~ Jasper Fforde

Modern Humans have at least dealt out death fairly: We began our existence by killing each other.

~ Mark Lynas

For a brief review of our history to date shows us in a very singular role:that of serial killers.

~ Mark Lynas

We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine.

~ Rachel Carson

For you, it’s all about money, money, money. But what about the forests I say? Some of those trees have been there for hundreds of years. What right have you to destroy that?

~ Emily Arden