Environmentalism Quotes

We need to consume less. A lot less. Less food, less energy, less stuff. Fewer cars, electric cars, cotton T-shirts, laptops, mobile phone upgrades. Far fewer.Yet, every decade, global consumption continues to increase relentlessly.

Stephen Emmott

I really admire people in the public eye, who have influence or celebrity and they take a stand on something important, bring awareness and take compassionate action.When you have been blessed with abundance or are an influencer and you bring attention to a cause, or do something to help the world, that's using your blessings for the greater good. Those are the people who inspire me.

Eileen Anglin

I was born for this moment in Earth's history and if you believe you are a lightworker, so were you.

Eileen Anglin

We are the vanguard of our times. What we do in our lifetimes will set the future of all beings. The loving, conscious choices you make for yourself will effect the future of life and of souls uncounted. This is how important you are. And this is how important loving yourself and living your best life is.

Eileen Anglin

We felt as though we had a responsibility to do something about it. So, we did.

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez

Where there is poverty, there will be destruction and exploitation by the corporations and governments benefitting from destroying our rainforests and trafficking wildlife.

Eileen Anglin

Stay awake. Spread awareness. Take action.

Eileen Anglin

Seeing that humans in modern cultures were destroying their environment for the sake of self-indulgence, the Dokkalfar focused their attention on poorer nations, whose terrain still flourished. A century of ethnic cleansing, deforestation, and war assured the land weakened and humans stayed in abject poverty. The result was a perfect contrast. In certain parts of the world, millions of children died of starvation and disease while other countries held excesses and riches never before seen. Earth became a place of greedy extremes. Societies lost the ability to relate to one another, choosing instead to focus on their own. No one noticed the one common theme every culture held. The world itself was dying.

Elizabeth Isaacs

Ethical vegetarians eat only plant-based food in order to show compassion toward animals and other humans and to benefit the planet.

Sharon Gannon

Nothing short of the end of the world would get our eco-conscious techies to toss their latest gadgets onto the street.

Susan Ee

I wish people had as much enthusiasm about unfucking the planet as they did about sports. Who wins on Sunday is pretty goddamned trivial compared to just about anything else.

Michael Brewer

She leaned into me, and I could feel her hot breath against my ear. 'I want you to eat me,' she whispered. 'I want you to eat me like you’re an angry Alaskan grizzly and I’m Timothy Treadwell.

Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price. That is the problem.

Wangari Maathai

Environmentalists and secular humanists insist that humans will destroy the planet. Corporate capitalists and many religious fundamentalists have no regard for wildlife and nature. Ultimately, this dualistic battle is based on false premises. In fact, this planet is more powerful than the human species.

Zeena Schreck

If you consume animal derived foods or use other animal derived products you are by no stretch of the imagination an "environmentalist." You are a rank hypocrite.

Will Hazlitt

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.

Paolo Bacigalupi

Extinction, the irrevocable loss of a species, causes pain that can never find relief. It is an ache that will pass from generation to generation for the rest of human history.

Callum Roberts

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

Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

David Brin

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

There's only three things you need to do when you are finished editing your book - Sleep! Sleep! and Sleep!

A. Louise Robertson

We still talk in terms of conquest,” she observed. “We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.” Without hesitating, she delivered her final blow: “I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.

Mark H. Lytle

It's going to take all of us, gathering our voices and acting together. Saying,"Not on our watch" to create a future for humans, animals and the environment.

Eileen Anglin

You're either for the environment or against the environment.

Mommy Moo Moo

Mother Nature is challenging enough, let's keep oil drilling out of the picture.

Mommy Moo Moo

Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.

Yvon Chouinard

Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.

Lierre Keith

A foolish environmentalist wants to save nature from the greed of the market by exposing it to the tragedy of the commons. A smart environmentalist wants to save nature from the tragedy of the commons by exposing it to the greed of the market.

Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

I don't expect everyone to feel the same way that I do about land. For so many of us, the scars are still too fresh. Fields of cotton stretching to the horizon - land worked, sweated, and suffered over for the profit of others - probably don't engender warm feelings among most black people. But the land, in spite of its history, still holds hope for making good on the promises we thought it could, especially if we can reconnect to it. The reparations lie not in what someone will give us, but in what we already own. The land can grow crops for us as well as it does for others. It can yield loblolly pine and white oak for us as it has for others. And it can nurture wildlife and the spirit for us, just like it has for others.

J. Drew Lanham

The wild things and places belong to all of us. So while I can't fix the bigger problems of race in the United States - can't suggest a means by which I, and others like me, will always feel safe - I can prescribe a solution in my own small corner. Get more people of color "out there." Turn oddities into commonplace. The presence of more black birders, wildlife biologists, hunters, hikers, and fisher-folk will say to others that we, too, appreciate the warble of a summer tanager, the incredible instincts of a whitetail buck, and the sound of wind in the tall pines. Our responsibility is to pass something on to those coming after. As young people of color reconnect with what so many of their ancestors knew - that our connections to the land run deep, like the taproots of mighty oaks; that the land renews and sustains us - maybe things will begin to change.

J. Drew Lanham

I have never heard of an electromagnetically hypersensitive person recovering from the condition using shielding and Faraday cages, they just seem to become social lepers due to their increasing reactivity to the city environment and addicts to their shielded environment.

Steven Magee

The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. Its a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers . . . The borders are open, folks! Come on in.

Arundhati Roy

I had fought on behalf of man against the sea, but I realised that it had become more urgent to fight on behalf of the sea against men.

Alain Bombard

What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead of the ordinary, ahead of what is already known. Art is what pulls on the next age. I’m not saying that my art is that, but that it would be good if it could be.

Andy Couturier

I thought I should make a place to bring light down into this world. All things that become realities start in that place of someone imagining them.

Andy Couturier

Why is it that so many people start to value money so much that they trade in most of the hours and years of their life in order to get it?

Andy Couturier

They have taken the idea of nonharming, of gentleness toward the earth, to a very radical level. Even the weeds are not enemies.

Andy Couturier

Sometimes just to touch the ground is enough for me, even if not a single thing grows from what I plant.

Andy Couturier

Often I'll go outside and just place my hands on the soil, even if there's no work to do on it. When I am filled with worries, I do that and I can feel the energy of the mountains and of the trees.

Andy Couturier

Time is what we have in this life, and how we use it determines what our life is.

Andy Couturier

My goal is to draw a line with some 'flavor' to it.

Andy Couturier

I think all people want freedom, but they've got this idea inserted into their head about money.

Andy Couturier

I finally understood that I couldn’t avoid working to provide for myself, but that can also be a wonderfulthing, a beautiful thing.

Andy Couturier

I don't think I understand that," Meg insisted. "How can you lust yourself into oblivion. ""Oh, easily," Ekaterina answered. "The lust is for things, possessions. The weapon turns on the nature of possessions, the fact that every possession you own consumes a part of you. Tools, instruments, if they are more than conceits, these things do not defy the rule but they are exceptional enough they don't activate the weapon. Consequently, the mission of these alleged scientists is to create generalized lust, a frenzied lust for things unconnected to any sense of utility.

Robert Stikmanz

Mankind is busily manufacturing its way into extinction.

Steven Magee

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.

Svante Arrhenius

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

Mehmet Murat ildan

You wanna know why the world is f**ked? This is why, this is exactly why…right here. Get a pen, write this down, this is important…The world is f**ked up because I eat WonderBread preserved with formaldehyde that lasts three weeks and will never grow mold as long as it’s kept in its magic silver bag. The world is f**ked up because I know my cans of tuna have mercury in it. The world is f**ked up because I know my flake light tuna and WonderBread are poisonous, yet I still eat them!

Shannon Lyndsy

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy—not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side.

Eric Hobsbawm

What’s wrong with being naked?”--Zeena Schreck on AMLA to Christian Minister Jerry Johnston

Zeena Schreck

Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.

Zeena Schreck

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.

Steven Magee

Just as we will spend large sums to preserve cities like Venice, even though future generations conceivably may not be interested in such architectural treasures, so we should preserve wilderness even though it is possible that future generations will care little for it.

Peter Singer

There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increase its value, its could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest.

Peter Singer

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?

Rachel Carson

Time and again our best and brightest have alerted society to looming problems, but our persistent pattern has been to ignore the warnings and suffer the consequences. The pathetic refrain of recent years --'Nobody saw this coming'--is always a self-serving lie.

Eugene Linden

Most every charge you level at American capitalism applies with equal force to communism, with this nice difference, that the Reds make no pretense at such frivolities as civil liberties or environmentalism. The differences in degree are so great that they result in a radical difference in kind.

Edward Abbey

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.

Naomi Klein

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.

Joseph Guth

Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?

Jane Goodall

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Environmentalism Quotes

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