Quotes About Environment

There is a feeble minority called conservationists, who are indignant about something. They are beginning to realize that their task involves the reorganization of society, rather than the passage of some fish and game laws.

La nostra società, sempre più grande e bella, a questo punto è come un ipocondriaco, talmente ossessionato dalla sua salute finanziaria da aver perso la capacità di rimanere sano. Il mondo è così incessantemente avido di vasche da bagno che ha perduto l'equilibrio necessario per costruirle e persino per chiudere i rubinetti.

That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is shown by an ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in . terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under science, of contributing to culture.

There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction. If they know how to plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a good shovel.

Recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.

Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.

I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.

There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.

We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of the land.

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail for replacement in as many decades

Such prosperity as we have known up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

One of the reasons there are so many terms for conditions of ice is that the mariners observing it were often trapped in it, and had nothing to do except look at it.

It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one's environment.

My dad's one of my biggest heroes. I also think Paul Newman's an inspiration. I know a lot of people say that, but I love that he's a great role model and a humanitarian. I admire people who don't necessarily want to change the world, but try to make it a better environment.

Today's water arguments reflect a growing unease about how to proceed when old certainties are being pushed aside and new options seem limited or unappealing. But the stark warnings implicit in Wisconsin's poisoned wells, the intersex and dying fish of Chesapeake Bay, Lake Mead's recored-low waterline, the decay of levees across the country, and the resource war in Alaska's Bristol Bay, cannot be ignored.

Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?

If you can't be in awe of Mother Nature, there's something wrong with you.