Quotes About Environment

The Scots had deforested their lands a century before the English. They were used to burning coal, and luckily for them, hard Scottish coal burned cleaner and brighter than soft Newcastle bituminous.

As coal replaced wood, its denser and more toxic smoke became a pestilence. Between 1591 and 1667, coal shipments into London increased from 35,000 tons to 264,000 tons; by 1700, that tonnage had almost doubled to 467,000 tons.27 An adequate supply of fossil fuel kept people warm and sustained the growth of English industry, but it also fouled the London air.

Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.

10 Coal, with its ubiquitous content of uranium and thorium, releases more radioactivity into the environment when it is burned than any other fuel.

A cheaper alternative was burning coal—sea coal or pit coal, the Elizabethans called it to distinguish it from charcoal.

We Christians did not take this world seriously, I am afraid, because our notion of God or salvation didn't include or honor the physical universe.

Without a sense of the inherent sacredness of the world—of every tiny bit of life and death—we struggle to see God in our own reality, let alone to respect reality, protect it, or love it. The consequences of this ignorance are all around us, seen in the way we have exploited and damaged our fellow human beings, the dear animals, the web of growing things, the land, the waters, and the very air.

the built environment is one thing, how people dwell in it another.

The distinction often seems precarious. Both traveler and tourist are, by definition, separate from their environment. We like to think that the role we aspire to, the traveler, has that distance on the scene that implies vision and understanding, while the tourist suffers the alienation of the passive viewer, the sightseer. At its worst, tourism is felt to represent a moral or spiritual failing. And in our hear we fear that we, too, are tourists.

Having no claims upon others, I bent the way the wind blew, rendering unto my environment that which was my environment's, and rendering unto myself that which I felt was mine.

Because I had no power to make things happen outside of me in the objective world, I made things happen within. Because my environment was bare and bleak, I endowed it with unlimited potentialities, redeemed it for the sake of my own hungry and cloudy yearning.

I have found on occasion that the Italians are suspicious of the benefits of air-conditioning. Or skeptical, or resistant, or oblivious to the benefits of air-conditioning.

The River Styx,' Annabeth murmured. 'It's so...' 'Polluted,' Charon said. 'For thousands of years, you humans have been throwing in everything as you come across - hopes, dreams, wishes that never came true. Irresponsible waste management, if you ask me.

I will not have a sea creature destroyed, if I can help it. And I can help it.

Die,human! Die, silly polluting nasty person!

For thousands of years, you humans have been throwing in everything as you come across--hopes, dreams, wishes that never came true. Irresponsible waste management, if you ask me.

Meg gagged. I hate bugs. That made sense for a daughter of the agriculture goddess, but to me the dead ant didn't seem any grosser than the piles of garbage in which we often swam.

Working for the environment didn't mean Ewan was a particularly nice person. He was very self-righteous about the fact that he didn't want any part of Graham's business empire, which apparently was playing its own small part in the "global capitalist conspiracy." That didn't stop him from taking money from Graham whenever he was home.

He missed having a wild green world on his doorstep - no rabbits or pheasants or badgers.

I wonder if anyone else has an ear so tuned and sharpened as I have, to detect the music, not of the spheres, but of earth, subtleties of major and minor chord that the wind strikes upon the tree branches. Have you ever heard the earth breathe?

you're doing the same thing I am, only more slowly, and less honestly. You drive a car; you use plastic products; you do whatever the hell you do knowing full well that it's contributing to the end of everyone, and a lot of other animals besides. So don't get all more-life-affirming-than-thou with me, missy, you're on your way out too. In a way, you could see me as he canary down a mine shaft, or maybe synecdoche, the small part representing the whole.

You save the whales and shoot the people, huh?

When the word ends, there'll be no more air. That's why it's important to pollute the air now.

Whereas the slums in Hamburg are the slums of its sailors, Berlin is a big slum.