quotations about environment
With the greenhouse in effect our environment was wrecked
Now I can only laugh as I read our epitaph
We end our lives as moles in the dark of the dawn patrol
MEGADETH
"Dawn Patrol", Rust in Peace
What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.
MAHATMA GANDHI
attributed, Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests
The Earth is what we all have in common.
WENDELL BERRY
The Art of the Commonplace
The truly healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating.
WILLIAM H. STEWART
Environmental Science and Technology
The ultimate test of man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.
GAYLORD NELSON
"Ah, Wilderness! Save It", The New York Times, September 4, 1984
The hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.
JOHN MUIR
My First Summer in the Sierra
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
WALLACE STEGNER
The Sound of Mountain Water
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 speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
DR. SEUSS
The Lorax
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"
Is a park any better than a coal mine? What's a mountain got that a slag pile hasn't? What would you rather have in your garden--an almond tree or an oil well?
JEAN GIRAUDOUX
The Madwoman of Chaillot
Coming from New York, I know that if you go by a delicatessen, and you put a sweet cucumber in the vinegar barrel, the cucumber might say, "No, I want to retain my sweetness." But it's hopeless. The barrel will turn the sweet cucumber into a pickle. You can't be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel.
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
"You Can't be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel: A Talk with Philip Zimbardo", Jan. 19, 2005
If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn; and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach.
VIOLA SPOLIN
Improvisation for the Theater
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
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
Caring for the Earth is not a hippie thing, it's a survival thing.
ANONYMOUS
It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
OSCAR WILDE
De Profundis
There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.
HERMAN E. DALY
Steady-State Economics
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
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