Quotes About Environment

Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.

Aqua Quorum

When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.

Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.

This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture -civilization- is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living thing.

If three hundred years of chainsaws, CFCs, depleted uranium, automobiles, genetic engineering, airplanes, routine international trade, computers, plastics, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, vivisection, internal combustion engines, feller bunchers, dragline excavators, televisions, cell phones, and nuclear (and conventional) bombs are not enough to convey the picture, then that picture will never be conveyed.

Our lawns manifest our cultural desire: they are static, they are artificial, and they are kept sexually immature.

Green cars could be made of pure refined nonsense and fueled by bright green hot air combined with the broken and destroyed dreams of every nonhuman on earth, and they'd still be destructive.

When people tell me population is the number one environmental problem we face today, I always respond that population is by no means primary. It's not even secondary or tertiary. First, there's the question of resource consumption […]. Second is the failure to accept limits, of which overpopulation and overconsumption are merely two linked symptoms.

Twelve thousand years ago, the war against the earth began. In nine places,2 people started to destroy the world by taking up agriculture. Understand what agriculture is: In blunt terms, you take a piece of land, clear every living thing off it—ultimately, down to the bacteria—and then plant it for human use. Make no mistake: agriculture is biotic cleansing.

Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo.

Clearly, then, the city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo. The

Our social structures depend on the organization. The organization depends on industry, which in turn depends on the market. The market depends on society, which in turn relies on the environment. All

In nature, there is no concept of possession or property hence there is no thief, police, or court of law.

In nature, nothing is contaminated. In culture, the polluted are cast out.

You can tell how high a society is by how much of its garbage is recycled.

And we can't have that. Plastic is no comparison for

When you're in a competitive environment, always give out the impression that you don't care. It makes people want you more. If you act desperate, it's over. I think a passive attitude is helpful. It comes naturally because I'm lazy.

When you realize the value of all life you dwell less on past and concentrate more on the conservation of the future.

Trees don't simply maintain the conditions necessary for human and most animal life on earth, trees created these conditions through the community of forests. Trees paved the way for the human family. The debt we owe them is too big to ever repay.

The truth was right there, so simple, a child could grasp it. Trees were responsible for the most basic necessity of life, the air we breathe.

Diana Beresford-Kroeger