Environment Quotes - Page 5

This is where the will to grapple with our hard and pressing environmental problems begins: in relationship to something other that you love beyond any utility, beyond any logic.

Your body and the environment around you may reflect the disturbing and unusual activities unfolding across the globe as the planet evolves.

History in its broadest aspect is a record of man's migrations from one environment to another.

Ellsworth Huntington

Mankind is busily manufacturing its way into extinction.

The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

This heated (environmental) debate is fundamentally about numbers. How much energy could each source deliver, at what economic and social cost, and with what risks? But actual numbers are rarely mentioned. In public debates, people just say “Nuclear is a money pit” or “We have a huge amount of wave and wind.” The trouble with this sort of language is that it’s not sufficient to know that something is huge: we need to know how the one “huge” compares with another “huge,” namely our huge energy consumption. To make this comparison, we need numbers, not adjectives.

Individuals are told to reduce our "carbon footprint," and we should. But how many years of riding a bike to work would it take me to offset one F-15 flying for an hour?

Bruce E. Johansen

The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if no other way, we can see the wild an reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index.

Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.

Terrible times breed terrible things, my lord.

George R.R. Martin

One species on the planet, and one species only, has reached the point of being able to have an impact on the evolutionary fortunes of all other species and upon the functioning of all ecosystems. We also have, in a way that is not true for any other species, a relationship to the planet as a whole and to the future. We live with all life.

Walter Truett Anderson

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!

Environmental pollution is not only humanity’s treason to humanity but also a treason to all other living creatures on earth!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Successful leaders know how to line up support for their initiatives and create the right environment for change and innovation.

Whatever you abuse will return to hunt you. Cultivate the self discipline to use everything within the environment God created them for.

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.

We must realize that growth is but an adolescent phase of life which stops when physical maturity is reached. If growth continues in the period of maturity it is called obesity or cancer. Prescribing growth as the cure for the energy crisis has all the logic of prescribing increasing quantities of food as a remedy for obesity.

Albert A. Bartlett

Armed with the new right to sell their products back to host societies, they can bleed both producing and buying populations at the same time. That is why under new international "free trade" agreements private corporations and businesses have increasingly demanded that governments deregulate and lower taxes so that they are not obliged to pay the cost of sustaining the life of host-societies or their environments.

In the Soviet Union you weren’t allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

In the global marketplace of the future the price of every product will tell the ecological truth.

Even if we could grow our way out of the crisis and delay the inevitable and painful reconciliation of virtual and real wealth, there is the question of whether this would be a wise thing to do. Marginal costs of additional growth in rich countries, such as global warming, biodiversity loss and roadways choked with cars, now likely exceed marginal benefits of a little extra consumption. The end result is that promoting further economic growth makes us poorer, not richer.

The global economy is a doomsday machine that must be stopped and reprogrammed.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by economic physicians who treat the basic malady of unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited growth.... Yet one certainly does not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatment dosage.

By being in harmony with your environment you are able to control more precisely what happens.

Of all creatures on earth, in proportion to their size and weight, humans have the smallest footprint on the ground and the largest on the environment.

For bighorns, topography is memory, enhanced by acute vision. They can anticipate the land's every contour--when to leap, where to climb, when to turn, which footholds will support their muscular bodies. To survive, this is what the band would have to do: make this perfect match of flesh to earth.

Think how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things." We talked about how animals don't just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation. While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk - which per gram is several times stronger than steel - at room temperature in water.

We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.

Jonathan Safran Foer

The Industrial Revolution appears to be in its final stages and it will be remembered as a time where industrial stock markets were at historic highs at the same time that many natural processes were shutting down, including the next generation of humans.

Overall, becoming a carbon-neutral country would involve changes in our behaviour, but these are modest compared with the changes that will be forced upon us if we do nothing.

Suppose that we believe that in 200 years, people would be prepared to pay a million dollars (that's in today's dollars, not inflated ones) to be able to have an unspoilt valley. Now imagine that today we can profit by cutting down the forest in the valley, which will never regrow. If we apply an annual discount rate of 5 percent, compounded exponentially, how big would that profit have to be to justify the loss of a million dollars in 2210? The answer, surprisingly, is just sixty dollars! That's all that a million dollars in 200 years is worth, at that rate of discount. Obviously, then, if we use a 5 percent discount rate, values gained one thousand years in the future scarcely count at all. This is not because of any uncertainty about whether there will be human beings or other sentient creatures inhabiting this planet at that time, but merely because of the compounding effect of the rate of return on money invested now.

When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.

Native American Saying

Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work.

When all the trees have been cut down and all the animals have been hunted to extinction, when all the waters are polluted and the air is unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

There is one problem, however, at least for alternative experiments of the American variety (and possibly some European as well), namely that we have no clear litmus test to determine which models are truly steady-state (non-expansionist) and which are business as usual hiding under “green wigs.” This latter trend is known as “greenwashing,” in which the language is hip and the bottom line remains profit. Thomas Friedman and Al Gore are major (and wealthy) players in this category, perpetuating the notion of “green corporations.” Other examples include a 2012 conference on “Sustainable Investing,” sponsored by Deepak Chopra, among others, which had as its slogans “Make Money and Make a Difference” and “Capitalism for a Democratic Society.” All of this is the attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too (or simply eat someone else’s cake); there is no real interest in disconnecting from growth, and it is growth that is the core of the problem. As Professor Magnuson tells us, while traveling around the U.S. to interview varous alternative businesses and experiments, he discovered that many of them were shams—capitalist wolves in green clothing.

What I mean when I talk about sovereignty is that "we have a different way of being". Those of us who are organising around the idea of sovereignty are not asking for inclusion within the capitalist system. We're not asking for the so-called benefits of a capitalist system, which is always based on exclusions because it is based on privatising what was once communal and shared. We're saying no to being incorporated. We're saying yes to a completely different way of being, to a society based on commonality and plurality, not the fundamentalism of markets, religion, and the gender binary. We're not pushing to get in. Why should we want to enmesh ourselves in an economy and a political system that is driving the planet and our species toward destruction?

Sendolo Diamina

But you can't just leave it at that!" said Anathema, pushing forward. "Think of all things you could do! Good things.""Like what?" said Adam suspiciously."Well... you could bring all the whales back, to start with."He put his head on one side. "An' that'd stop people killing them?"She hesitated. It would have been nice to say yes."An' if people do start killing 'em, what would you ask me to do about 'em?" said Adam. "No. I reckon I'm getting the hang of this now. Once I start messing around like that, there'd be no stoppin' it. Seems to me, the only sensible thing is for people to know if they kill a whale, they've got a dead whale.

Terry Pratchett

Leadership obeys the principle of Hooke's law to the very bone. It explains:When an elastic material is stretched, it returns to its original position. But when it's over stretched beyond its limit point, it loses its elasticity and becomes plastic, and later cuts or breaks.As a leader, in your leadership disposition, it behoves of you to acquaint yourself with this very leadership principle that edges forward. It's however, a human nature to adopt to an environment, so, leaders are humans, they tend to have this rapore with their followers which is somewhat a must needed. But the ability for such one to return and recollect to knowing his boundary makes a good leader. A phenomenon whereby he becomes drunk of platitudes, then it comes to a time where they (followers) dictate for him. And even sought and suggest plans without his consent or knowing, it has gotten to the point of plastic and break respectively.

Richmond Akhigbe

...the hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too... More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture - modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class - is poor in its sensitivity to nature... As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man's concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side.

Francis A.Schaeffer

The important concept of the solar wind is that Space is not empty. It is an energy and particle filled environment that interacts with whatever is in it! Astronomers call this 'Dark Energy'.

Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.

Police officers are poorly paid for a very stressful job that has them in very high powered radio frequency (RF) fields and in a daily environment that may result in them being assaulted, maimed or killed.

It is only individual great forces, which must be pulled together, in our common vision of combating the climate change.

Lailah Gifty Akita

We're at a crucial point in history. We cannot have fast cars, computers the size of credit cards, and modern conveniences, whilst simultaneously having clean air, abundant rainforests, fresh drinking water and a stable climate. This generation can have one or the other but not both. Humanity must make a choice. Both have an opportunity cost. Gadgetry or nature? Pick the wrong one and the next generations may have neither.

Don't cling to your self-concept purely because your will demands it. Demand that your environment aligns as much as possible and change what you must about yourself when the outer world can’t be changed. Mental health is about mental fluidity, mental illness stems in rigidity.

We are such spendthrifts with our lives, the trick of living is to slip on and off the planet with the least fuss you can muster. I’m not running for sainthood. I just happen to think that in life we need to be a little like the farmer, who puts back into the soil what he takes out.

In the preface of "The Rifles" "Another rule we followed was never kill an animal that we were not going to use for food or clothing." Barnabas Piryuaq"Well, in those high latitudes we found such quantities of seals and walruses that we simply did not know what to do with them.There were thousands and thousands lying there; we walked among them and hit them on the head, and laughed heartily in the abundance which God had created." Jan Welzi 1933.

William T. Vollmann

People in every nation behave and respond according to the values and virtues upon which they were raised. We all are a product of our environment.

Imagine a man without lungs. Imagine earth without Amazon rainforest.

The church must integrate into the environment

Now we, if not in the spirit, have been caught up to see our earth, our mother, Gaia Mater, set like a jewel in space. We have no excuse now for supposing her riches inexhaustible nor the area we have to live on limitless because unbounded. We are the children of that great blue white jewel. Through our mother we are part of the solar system and part through that of the whole universe. In the blazing poetry of the fact we are children of the stars.

William Golding

Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the earth. It is the only habitable place we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live and we are compelled to share it; it is our only home... the earth's biosphere seems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for we evolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have.

The Earth is what we all have in common.

They've never known a time when people drank rain water because it was pure, or could eat snow, or swim in any river or brook. The last time I drove to Washington the traffic was so bad that I could have made better time with a horse.

Madeleine L'Engle

We depend on this planet to eat, drink, breathe, and live. Figuring out how to keep our life support system running needs to be our number-one priority. Nothing is more important than finding a way to live together - justly, respectfully, sustainably, joyfully - on the only planet we can call home.

There is earth below your earth, a deep room wheregas and oil, rock and stone, circulate like slow bloodthrough a body.

Mathew Henderson

The aquatic environment must be safeguarded by men. God created mankind to care for the environment and all the living resources.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Let's stop fighting over who we believe created the planet, & work together against those that choose to destroy it.

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