Environment Quotes

Do you know how many acres of beautiful forests and moors have been destroyed by your company? How many animals have lost their homes and how many trees have been murdered? I am sick of being bothered by you people.

~ Emily Arden

Unfortunately for the existing mature systems in nature, the rapid expansion of the human bubble is destroying them. Unfortunately for us, we can't exist without them any more than a living person can exist without oxygen or a body can exist without a head. In this sense, it is actually a conceptual error to define the environment as the rest of the biosphere save humans, and think of ourselves as apart from it, since we can't exist without it.

~ Jacob Lund Fisker

Observe the behavior of your environment carefully for clues as to what is acceptable and rewarded.

~ Bonnie Marcus

Our kids need us to be the dad, not a fun single uncle. When you can replace your 007 poster with a framed portrait of Grandma, your kids will experience an underlying sense of being at home when they are with you—whether for a weekend, a summer, or full-time.

~ Tez Brooks

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

~ R. Buckminster Fuller

God loves cleanliness.The environment must be kept clean.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

If you really think that the enviroment is less important than the economy, try holding your breath while you count your money.

~ Dr. Guy Mcpherson

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.

~ Edward O. Wilson

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

~ Audre Lorde

The ancient trees are the deep earth's language for speaking to the universe. The earth communicates through trees to the animals and to the birds living above - and to the very heavens. The trees draw the earth's water up from the ground. Then breathing, they return it to the air for the clouds and the blessed rain that falls to begin the cycle anew. She thinks of the thin layer of living things as a fragile space between earth's molten rock core and the frozen outer universe of stars. The thin layer is like her own life here - precious, finite

~ J.j. Brown

We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism.

~ John Brunner

The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage!

~ John Brunner

Right! Right! 'Stead of which, over here, they shit in the water until it's dangerous to drink, then make a fucking fortune out of selling us gadgets to purify it again. Why can't they be made to strain out their own shit?

~ John Brunner

The ancient trees are the deep earth's language for speaking to the universe. The earth communicates through trees to the animals and to the birds living above - and to the very heavens. The trees draw the earth's water up from the ground. Then breathing, they return it to the air for the clouds and the blessed rain that falls to begin the cycle anew. She thinks of the thin layer of living things as a fragile space between earth's molten rock core and the frozen outer universe of stars. The thin layer is like her own life here - precious, finite.

~ J.j. Brown

In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?

~ Adam Minter

Create and maintain a beautiful environment and surroundings in which to live.

~ Bryant Mcgill

I don't fear fracking. I fear carbon

~ Russell Gold

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 more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

~ Rachel Carson

Is it wrong of me to propose a ceasefire agreement between humans and whales and dolphins, I know it is in actuality a one sided massacre, but so was Bosnia and there the ceasefire is holding, so would it be nice to have a declaration backing a ceasefire between us mammals?

~ Steve Merrick

The idea of unlimited growth... needs to be seriously questioned on at least two counts: the availability of basic resources and... the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied. - E.F. Schumacher

~ Wayne Ellwood

In recent years, academics, policy-makers, and experts have raised the question of the applicability of peacetime environmental law in times of armed conflict.

~ Widad Akreyi

Take the time to get it right. There'll be gas tomorrow night

~ Russell Gold

Across the world, the lack of accountability for the harm to the environment and public health caused by conflict and military activities undermines global efforts to help fragile countries recover from armed conflicts

~ Widad Akreyi

Toxic remnants of war represent a profound challenge for the protection of public health and the restoration of the environment in countries affected by conflict.

~ Widad Akreyi

In spring, 1937, of course, families still rode the rails because of the Depression, which everyone said was already in the history books as the worst ever. The jobs still couldn’t be found, at least for most people. Everett itself—the smaller, poorer, little brother lying north of Seattle—ached with the unemployed and the hopeless. The labor union tensions in the woods still festered and got bloody at times. But Skybillings—and the railroad logging shows of the Cascade Mountains—felt like they were, inch-by-inch, rebuilding America.

~ Ronald Geigle

Seems like people always want to think they're doomed. It brings them some kind of black comfort, I guess.Nate

~ C.j. Box

Fracking is different. The risks of any single well are tiny compared to a nuclear power plant. But several hundred wells? Several thousand?

~ Russell Gold

Fracking ensures that the age of oil-and it's princely hydrocarbon cousin, the natural gas molecule-will not end because we have run out of fossil fuels. But it may end because burning these wonderful fuels puts the planet farther down a path we don't want to head down

~ Russell Gold

We are fossil fuel addicts. What happens when drug addicts detox? They can be rash, cranky, even psychotic and dangerous. It would be good for the environment if the entire economy abruptly quit fossil fuels, but that's not realistic. I wouldn't want to be around if it ever happened. Perhaps it's best to think of natural gas like methadone. It's a way for an energy addicted society to get off dirtier fuels and smooth out the detox bumps.

~ Russell Gold

The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

~ Margaret Atwood

Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.

~ Derrick Jensen

The necessity of political struggle especially means confronting and contradicting those on the left who say that resistance is futile. Such people have no place in a movement for justice. For actionists who choose to work aboveground, this confrontation with detractors - and some of these detractors reject the idea of resistance of any kind - is one of the small, constant actions you can take. Defend the possibility of resistance, insist on a moral imperative of fighting for this planet, and argue for direct action against perpetrators. Despite what much of the left has now embraced, we are not all equally responsible. There are a few corporations that have turned the planet into a dead commodity for their private wealth, destroying human cultures along with it.

~ Lierre Keith

We forget that we humans are animals, inextricably connected to the world and everything in it. In the rush to bring GMO food to the world because it was good for us, nobody had asked the question whether it would be good for the world.

~ Kenneth Eade

This exciting new field of epigenetics--meaning literally around the gene--allows us to see how environmental factors alter our gene expression in a specific place within each cell. As a result, we now know that when we take active control of these factors, we can literally help control our health and genetic destiny.

~ Woodson Merrell

the assumptions that pollution is the price of progress or that we must choose between jobs and the environment have long limited our creative thinking about innovative solutions that can be good for the environment, the workers, and a healthy economy.

~ Annie Leonard

Nature is inexhaustibly sustainable if we care for it. It is our universal responsibility to pass a healthy earth onto future generations.

~ Sylvia Dolson

New Rule: Oil companies must stop with the advertisements implying they're friends of the environment. At Exxon Mobil, we care about a thriving wildlife. Please--the only thing an oil executive has in common with a seagull is they'd both steal french fries from a baby.

~ Bill Maher

The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity’s captive.

~ Daniel Quinn

We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.

~ Russell Banks