quotations about environment
The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature--nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing.
LOUDON WAINWRIGHT
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attributed, The Greatest Quotations of All Time
You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them.
WANGARI MAATHAI
attributed, Managing the Environmental Crisis in Ghana
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Familiar Letters
I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos.
GEORGE CARLIN
"The Planet Is Fine"
If you really think the environment is less important than the economy try holding your breathe while you count your money.
ANONYMOUS
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
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
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
There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.
HERMAN E. DALY
Steady-State Economics
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
All across the world, in every kind of environment and region known to man, increasingly dangerous weather patterns and devastating storms are abruptly putting an end to the long-running debate over whether or not climate change is real. Not only is it real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster.
BARACK OBAMA
speech, Apr. 3, 2006
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
DR. SEUSS
The Lorax
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
Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.
DAVID EHRENFELD
The Arrogance of Humanism
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
Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.
STEWART UDALL
1976: Agenda for Tomorrow
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
When the well's dry, we know the worth of water.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanac
All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.
KOFI ANNAN
2005 report for the United Nations 60th anniversary summit
I look at my environment
And wonder where the fire went
What happened to everything we used to be?
LAURYN HILL
"The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill"