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We
say we love flowers, yet we pluck them. We say we love trees, yet we
cut them down. And people still wonder why some are afraid when told
they are loved. ~Author Unknown
Take nothing but pictures.
Leave nothing but footprints.
Kill nothing but time.
~Motto of the Baltimore Grotto, a caving society
Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him? ~Pierre Troubetzkoy
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. ~Richard P. Feynman
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. ~Chief Seattle, 1855
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. ~John Muir
You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755
Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations. ~David Gerrold
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth. ~Albert Schweitzer, quoted in James Brabazon, Albert Schweitzer
The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children. ~Paul R. Ehrlich
Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth. ~Ian McHarg
Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values.... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it. ~Charles A. Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, July 1972
The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself. ~Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. ~Chief Luther Standing Bear
The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature - nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing. ~Loudon Wainwright
Every day is Earth Day. ~Author Unknown
Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust? ~Lane Olinghouse
Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman. ~Luther Burbank
Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake.... During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast. ~William Rathje, The Economist, 8 September 1990
Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away. ~Stephanie Mills, ed., In Praise of Nature, 1990
How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?... Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore. ~Anonymous Wintu Woman
Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature. ~Dave Foreman, Harper's, April 1990
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. ~Carl Sagan
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. ~John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19 September 1871
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. ~Henry David Thoreau, "Chesuncook," The Maine Woods, 1848
Man maketh a death which Nature never made. ~Edward Young
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. ~Rachel Carson
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. ~Mahatma Gandhi
It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times.... What the Dickens is going on here? ~Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology, and risk, quoted in National Academy of Sciences, Improving Risk Communication, 1989
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die. ~Gil Stern
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. ~Stephen Jay Gould, "Our Allotted Lifetimes," The Panda's Thumb, 1980
Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind. ~David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978
The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality.... Whole forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality. ~Irving Babbitt
Drive Nature forth by force, she'll turn and rout
The false refinements that would keep her out.
~Horace, Odes
Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place. ~Rene Dubos, Medical Utopias, 1961
In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment. ~Richard Wilkinson
Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of Americans as having a higher [quality of life] not because of what it has, but rather because of what it does not have! ~Don A. Dillman, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1977
We have been god-like in the planned breeding of our domesticated plants, but rabbit-like in the unplanned breeding of ourselves. ~Arnold Toynbee
Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back. ~Rene Dubos, Mirage of Health, 1959
Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow. ~Edwin Way Teale, Autumn Across America, 1956
Waste is a tax on the whole people. ~Albert W. Atwood
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
The rose has thorns only for those who would gather it. ~Chinese Proverb
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. ~Jean Arp
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. ~Albert Einstein
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 every day. ~Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 1897
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty. ~Albert Einstein, 1950
A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things - including man. All life forms obey Nature's demands - except man, who has found ways of ignoring them. ~Eugene M. Poirot, Our Margin of Life, 1978
When you use a manual push mower, you're "cutting" down on pollution and the only thing in danger of running out of gas is you! ~Grey Livingston
After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world. ~Pam Shaw
As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, "They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them." ~U Thant, speech, 1970
The command "Be fruitful and multiply" was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people. ~William Ralph Inge, More Lay Thoughts of a Dean, 1931
Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, was a major factor in the development of the Western worldview.... A basic Christian belief was that God gave humans dominion over creation, with the freedom to use the environment as they saw fit. Another important Judeo-Christian belief predicted that God would bring a cataclysmic end to the Earth sometime in the future. One interpretation of this belief is that the Earth is only a temporary way station on the soul's journey to the afterlife. Because these beliefs tended to devalue the natural world, they fostered attitudes and behaviors that had a negative effect on the environment. ~Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment, 1996
For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. ~Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things. Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe. ~William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man, 1974
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. ~Edward O. Wilson
Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead. ~Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics, 1977
Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but when I told that story around the campfire, nobody got scared. ~Jack Handey
The human race will be the cancer of the planet. ~Julian Huxley, attributed
Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life. ~René Dubos, quoted in Life, 28 July 1970
One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England. ~Glenn T. Seaborg, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, speech, Argonne National Laboratory, 1969
Our children may save us if they are taught to care properly for the planet; but if not, it may be back to the Ice Age or the caves from where we first emerged. Then we'll have to view the universe above from a cold, dark place. No more jet skis, nuclear weapons, plastic crap, broken pay phones, drugs, cars, waffle irons, or television. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea. ~Jimmy Buffet, Mother Earth News, March-April 1990
Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system. ~Channing E. Phillips, speech, Washington, D.C., 22 April 1970
The days a man spends fishing or spends hunting should not be deducted from the time that he's on earth. In other words, if I fish today, that should be added to the amount of time I get to live. That's the way I look at recreation. That's why I'll be a big conservation, environmental President, because I plan to fish and hunt as much as I possibly can. ~George Bush, quoted in Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1988
The desire to build a risk-free society has always been a sign of decadence. It has meant that the nation has given up, that it no longer believes in its destiny, that it has ceased to aspire to greatness, and has retired from history to pet itself. ~Henry Fairlie, quoted in Conservation Foundation Letter, November 1981
The exquisite sight, sound, and smell of wilderness is many times more powerful if it is earned through physical achievement, if it comes at the end of a long and fatiguing trip for which vigorous good health is necessary. Practically speaking, this means that no one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means. ~Garrett Hardin, The Ecologist, February 1974
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. ~Al Gore
Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and he'll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years. ~Charles Haas
Primeval forests! virgin sod!
That Saxon has not ravish'd yet,
Lo! peak on peak in stairways set—
In stepping stairs that reach to God!
Here we are free as sea or wind,
For here are set Time's snowy tents
In everlasting battlements
Against the march of Saxon mind.
~Joaquin Miller, "Isles of the Amazons," 1872
When the soil disappears, the soul disappears. ~Terri Guillemets
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. ~Native American Wisdom
The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology. ~E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973
The tourist business is a trap, it is a tained honey;
Man clearly should have stayed in bed, and not invented money.
~Kenneth E. Boulding, "The Ballad of Ecological Awareness," in M. Taghi Farvar and John P. Milton, eds., The Careless Technology, 1972
There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet. ~Brooke Medicine Eagle
This is a beautiful planet and not at all fragile. Earth can withstand significant volcanic eruptions, tectonic cataclysms, and ice ages. But this canny, intelligent, prolific, and extremely self-centered human creature had proven himself capable of more destruction of life than Mother Nature herself.... We've got to be stopped. ~Michael L. Fischer, Harper's, July 1990
Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more. ~Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons, 1953
To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance. ~Buddha
To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. ~Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907
Today's world is one in which the age-old risks of humankind - the drought, floods, communicable diseases - are less of a problem than ever before. They have been replaced by risks of humanity's own making - the unintended side-effects of beneficial technologies and the intended effects of the technologies of war. Society must hope that the world's ability to assess and manage risks will keep pace with its ability to create them. ~J. Clarence Davies, quoted in Conservation Foundation, State of the Environment: An Assessment at Mid-Decade, 1984
U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough aluminum to rebuild the commercial air fleet every three months; enough iron and steel to continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill New York's World Trade Center every two weeks. ~Environmental Defense Fund advertisement, Christian Science Monitor, 1990
Water flows uphill towards money. ~Anonymous, saying in the American West, quoted by Ivan Doig in Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986
Living in the midst of abundance we have the greatest difficulty in seeing that the supply of natural wealth is limited and that the constant increase of population is destined to reduce the American standard of living unless we deal more sanely with our resources. ~W.H. Carothers
We have always had reluctance to see a tract of land which is empty of men as anything but a void. The "waste howling wilderness" of Deuteronomy is typical. The Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as wild or uncultivated land which is occupied "only" by wild animals. Places not used by us are "wastes." Areas not occupied by us are "desolate." Could the desolation be in the soul of man? ~John A. Livingston, in Borden Spears, ed., Wilderness Canada, 1970
We must not be forced to explore the universe in search of a new home because we have made the Earth inhospitable, even uninhabitable. For if we do not solve the environmental and related social problems that beset us on Earth - pollution, toxic contamination, resource depletion, prejudice, poverty, hunger - those problems will surely accompany us to other worlds. ~Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment, 1996
Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris. ~Edward Abbey
We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man. ~Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," 1967
The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. ~Lynn I. White, Jr., Science, 10 March 1967
The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory. ~René Dubos, The Wooing of Earth, 1980
We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet. ~Jeremy Rifkin, World Press Review, 30 December 1989
Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. ~Lewis Mumford
When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman. ~Joseph Wood Krutch
When some high-sounding institute states that a compound is harmless or a process free of risk, it is wise to know whence the institute or the scientists who work there obtain their financial support. ~Lancet, editorial on the "medical-industrial complex," 1973
When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.... When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don't chop down the trees. ~Wintu Indian, quoted in Julian Burger, The Gaia Atlas of First Peoples, 1990
We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems. ~Janet Holmes à Court
With laissez-faire and price atomic,
Ecology's Uneconomic,
But with another kind of logic
Economy's Unecologic.
~Kenneth E. Boulding, in Frank F. Darling and John P. Milton, eds., Future Environments of North America, 1966
You go into a community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in favor of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20 minutes a year to having their car emissions inspected, they will vote 80 to 20 against it. We are a long way in this country from taking individual responsibility for the environmental problem. ~William D. Ruckelshaus, former EPA administrator, New York Times, 30 November 1988
Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all. ~Michael Fox, Sierra, November-December 1990
Loyd: "It has to do with keeping things in balance. It's like the spirits have made a deal with us. We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."
Codi: "Like a note you'd send somebody after you'd stayed in their house?"
Loyd: "Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.'"
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't breathe the air. ~Changing Times magazine
Take nothing but pictures.
Leave nothing but footprints.
Kill nothing but time.
~Motto of the Baltimore Grotto, a caving society
Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him? ~Pierre Troubetzkoy
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. ~Richard P. Feynman
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect. ~Chief Seattle, 1855
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. ~John Muir
You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755
Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations. ~David Gerrold
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth. ~Albert Schweitzer, quoted in James Brabazon, Albert Schweitzer
The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children. ~Paul R. Ehrlich
Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions upon the earth. ~Ian McHarg
Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values.... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it. ~Charles A. Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, July 1972
The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself. ~Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. ~Chief Luther Standing Bear
The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature - nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing. ~Loudon Wainwright
Every day is Earth Day. ~Author Unknown
Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust? ~Lane Olinghouse
Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman. ~Luther Burbank
Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake.... During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast. ~William Rathje, The Economist, 8 September 1990
Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away. ~Stephanie Mills, ed., In Praise of Nature, 1990
How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?... Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore. ~Anonymous Wintu Woman
Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature. ~Dave Foreman, Harper's, April 1990
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. ~Carl Sagan
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual. ~John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19 September 1871
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. ~Henry David Thoreau, "Chesuncook," The Maine Woods, 1848
Man maketh a death which Nature never made. ~Edward Young
It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. ~Rachel Carson
God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts. ~Mahatma Gandhi
It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times.... What the Dickens is going on here? ~Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology, and risk, quoted in National Academy of Sciences, Improving Risk Communication, 1989
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die. ~Gil Stern
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. ~Stephen Jay Gould, "Our Allotted Lifetimes," The Panda's Thumb, 1980
Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind. ~David Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism, 1978
The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality.... Whole forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality. ~Irving Babbitt
Drive Nature forth by force, she'll turn and rout
The false refinements that would keep her out.
~Horace, Odes
Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place. ~Rene Dubos, Medical Utopias, 1961
In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment. ~Richard Wilkinson
Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of Americans as having a higher [quality of life] not because of what it has, but rather because of what it does not have! ~Don A. Dillman, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1977
We have been god-like in the planned breeding of our domesticated plants, but rabbit-like in the unplanned breeding of ourselves. ~Arnold Toynbee
Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back. ~Rene Dubos, Mirage of Health, 1959
Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow. ~Edwin Way Teale, Autumn Across America, 1956
Waste is a tax on the whole people. ~Albert W. Atwood
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
The rose has thorns only for those who would gather it. ~Chinese Proverb
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. ~Jean Arp
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. ~Albert Einstein
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 every day. ~Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 1897
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty. ~Albert Einstein, 1950
A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things - including man. All life forms obey Nature's demands - except man, who has found ways of ignoring them. ~Eugene M. Poirot, Our Margin of Life, 1978
When you use a manual push mower, you're "cutting" down on pollution and the only thing in danger of running out of gas is you! ~Grey Livingston
After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world. ~Pam Shaw
As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, "They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them." ~U Thant, speech, 1970
The command "Be fruitful and multiply" was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people. ~William Ralph Inge, More Lay Thoughts of a Dean, 1931
Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, was a major factor in the development of the Western worldview.... A basic Christian belief was that God gave humans dominion over creation, with the freedom to use the environment as they saw fit. Another important Judeo-Christian belief predicted that God would bring a cataclysmic end to the Earth sometime in the future. One interpretation of this belief is that the Earth is only a temporary way station on the soul's journey to the afterlife. Because these beliefs tended to devalue the natural world, they fostered attitudes and behaviors that had a negative effect on the environment. ~Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment, 1996
For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death. ~Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living things. Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the unity and harmony of the universe. ~William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man, 1974
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. ~Edward O. Wilson
Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead. ~Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics, 1977
Somebody told me it was frightening how much topsoil we are losing each year, but when I told that story around the campfire, nobody got scared. ~Jack Handey
The human race will be the cancer of the planet. ~Julian Huxley, attributed
Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life. ~René Dubos, quoted in Life, 28 July 1970
One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England. ~Glenn T. Seaborg, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, speech, Argonne National Laboratory, 1969
Our children may save us if they are taught to care properly for the planet; but if not, it may be back to the Ice Age or the caves from where we first emerged. Then we'll have to view the universe above from a cold, dark place. No more jet skis, nuclear weapons, plastic crap, broken pay phones, drugs, cars, waffle irons, or television. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea. ~Jimmy Buffet, Mother Earth News, March-April 1990
Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system. ~Channing E. Phillips, speech, Washington, D.C., 22 April 1970
The days a man spends fishing or spends hunting should not be deducted from the time that he's on earth. In other words, if I fish today, that should be added to the amount of time I get to live. That's the way I look at recreation. That's why I'll be a big conservation, environmental President, because I plan to fish and hunt as much as I possibly can. ~George Bush, quoted in Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1988
The desire to build a risk-free society has always been a sign of decadence. It has meant that the nation has given up, that it no longer believes in its destiny, that it has ceased to aspire to greatness, and has retired from history to pet itself. ~Henry Fairlie, quoted in Conservation Foundation Letter, November 1981
The exquisite sight, sound, and smell of wilderness is many times more powerful if it is earned through physical achievement, if it comes at the end of a long and fatiguing trip for which vigorous good health is necessary. Practically speaking, this means that no one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means. ~Garrett Hardin, The Ecologist, February 1974
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. ~Al Gore
Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and he'll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years. ~Charles Haas
Primeval forests! virgin sod!
That Saxon has not ravish'd yet,
Lo! peak on peak in stairways set—
In stepping stairs that reach to God!
Here we are free as sea or wind,
For here are set Time's snowy tents
In everlasting battlements
Against the march of Saxon mind.
~Joaquin Miller, "Isles of the Amazons," 1872
When the soil disappears, the soul disappears. ~Terri Guillemets
You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of your grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children, that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves. ~Native American Wisdom
The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology. ~E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, 1973
The tourist business is a trap, it is a tained honey;
Man clearly should have stayed in bed, and not invented money.
~Kenneth E. Boulding, "The Ballad of Ecological Awareness," in M. Taghi Farvar and John P. Milton, eds., The Careless Technology, 1972
There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet. ~Brooke Medicine Eagle
This is a beautiful planet and not at all fragile. Earth can withstand significant volcanic eruptions, tectonic cataclysms, and ice ages. But this canny, intelligent, prolific, and extremely self-centered human creature had proven himself capable of more destruction of life than Mother Nature herself.... We've got to be stopped. ~Michael L. Fischer, Harper's, July 1990
Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more. ~Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons, 1953
To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance. ~Buddha
To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed. ~Theodore Roosevelt, seventh annual message, 3 December 1907
Today's world is one in which the age-old risks of humankind - the drought, floods, communicable diseases - are less of a problem than ever before. They have been replaced by risks of humanity's own making - the unintended side-effects of beneficial technologies and the intended effects of the technologies of war. Society must hope that the world's ability to assess and manage risks will keep pace with its ability to create them. ~J. Clarence Davies, quoted in Conservation Foundation, State of the Environment: An Assessment at Mid-Decade, 1984
U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough aluminum to rebuild the commercial air fleet every three months; enough iron and steel to continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill New York's World Trade Center every two weeks. ~Environmental Defense Fund advertisement, Christian Science Monitor, 1990
Water flows uphill towards money. ~Anonymous, saying in the American West, quoted by Ivan Doig in Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986
Living in the midst of abundance we have the greatest difficulty in seeing that the supply of natural wealth is limited and that the constant increase of population is destined to reduce the American standard of living unless we deal more sanely with our resources. ~W.H. Carothers
We have always had reluctance to see a tract of land which is empty of men as anything but a void. The "waste howling wilderness" of Deuteronomy is typical. The Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as wild or uncultivated land which is occupied "only" by wild animals. Places not used by us are "wastes." Areas not occupied by us are "desolate." Could the desolation be in the soul of man? ~John A. Livingston, in Borden Spears, ed., Wilderness Canada, 1970
We must not be forced to explore the universe in search of a new home because we have made the Earth inhospitable, even uninhabitable. For if we do not solve the environmental and related social problems that beset us on Earth - pollution, toxic contamination, resource depletion, prejudice, poverty, hunger - those problems will surely accompany us to other worlds. ~Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000: Protecting Our Global Environment, 1996
Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris. ~Edward Abbey
We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man. ~Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," 1967
The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects. ~Lynn I. White, Jr., Science, 10 March 1967
The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory. ~René Dubos, The Wooing of Earth, 1980
We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet. ~Jeremy Rifkin, World Press Review, 30 December 1989
Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences. ~Lewis Mumford
When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman. ~Joseph Wood Krutch
When some high-sounding institute states that a compound is harmless or a process free of risk, it is wise to know whence the institute or the scientists who work there obtain their financial support. ~Lancet, editorial on the "medical-industrial complex," 1973
When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.... When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don't chop down the trees. ~Wintu Indian, quoted in Julian Burger, The Gaia Atlas of First Peoples, 1990
We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems. ~Janet Holmes à Court
With laissez-faire and price atomic,
Ecology's Uneconomic,
But with another kind of logic
Economy's Unecologic.
~Kenneth E. Boulding, in Frank F. Darling and John P. Milton, eds., Future Environments of North America, 1966
You go into a community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in favor of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20 minutes a year to having their car emissions inspected, they will vote 80 to 20 against it. We are a long way in this country from taking individual responsibility for the environmental problem. ~William D. Ruckelshaus, former EPA administrator, New York Times, 30 November 1988
Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all. ~Michael Fox, Sierra, November-December 1990
Loyd: "It has to do with keeping things in balance. It's like the spirits have made a deal with us. We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."
Codi: "Like a note you'd send somebody after you'd stayed in their house?"
Loyd: "Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one.'"
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. ~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country, don't breathe the air. ~Changing Times magazine
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