Quotes About Environment

Joni Mitchell had it right: "They paved paradise / and put up a parking lot." But perhaps, in the near future, we could add a line of hopeful epilogue to that song: then they tore down the parking lot / and raised up a paradise

My contention throughout this book is that reconnecting to nature is one key to growing a larger environmental movement. That reconnection is visceral and immediately useful to many people's lives. Encouraging personal reconnection does not mean less engagement with global environmental issues; it means more. To act, most of us need motivation beyond despair.

Nature was still out there. There was less of it, to be sure, but it was there just the same.

The greener the setting, the more the relief.

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.

to Nancy Wells, assistant professor of design and environmental analysis in the New York State College of Human Ecology at Cornell. "And the protective impact of nearby nature is strongest for the most vulnerable children—those experiencing the highest levels of stressful life events.

As an adult, giving presentations at local high schools, I noticed that I can get teenagers to focus and calm down by showing images of the natural world. Being close to nature saved my life.

This seems clear enough: When truly present in nature, we do use all our senses at the same time, which is the optimum state of learning.

For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality.

Until recently, most environmental organizations offered only token attention to children. Perhaps their lack of zeal stems from an unconscious ambivalence about children, who symbolize or represent overpopulation. So goes the unspoken mantra: We have met the enemy and it is our progeny.

just as children need good nutrition and adequate sleep, they may very well need contact with nature.

A plant has been defined as a living thing that absorbs in microscopic amounts over its surface all that it needs for growth. Through

food chain - the vitally important system by which matter from soil and air passes through plants and animals and back to soil and air. It is this system upon which all life depends.

To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.

In New York, it's already clear that just a few months of neglect by city maintenance teams would lead to the streets becoming a burgeoning forest of Chinese tree-of-heaven seedlings.

bristly oxtongue, a weed whose scabby leaves looked as if they were afflicted by industrial acne.

What obligation is more binding than to protect the cherished, to defend whoever or whatever cannot defend itself, and to nurture in turn that which has given nourishment? I'm reminded of words written by John Seed, an Australian environmentalist. When he began considering these questions, he believed, "I am protecting the rain forest." But as his thought evolved, he realized, "I am part of the rain forest protecting myself.

Around the world, about a thousand dolphins are held in captivity, while millions have been killed in purse seine tuna nets and drift nets. Tens of thousands of others have been "sacrificed" in the name of scientific research, some marine mammals merely to find out what they've been eating.

I'm fighting now only for individual captive dolphins and dolphins in general but also for people, for the mind and sensibilities of future generations toward the world itself.

Roses can grow in slums just as weeds can grow around mansions.

Know your enemy. Know the terrain. Know the conditions under which the battle will be fought.

This is not our world with trees in it. It's a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.

Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling.