Quotes About Environment

When a man must be afraid to drink freely from his country's river and streams that country is no longer fit to live in.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

Saving the world is only a hobby. Most of the time I do nothing.

God bless America. Let's try to save some of it.

I think it is far more important to save one square mile of wilderness, anywhere, by any means, than to produce another book on the subject.

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.

How to pry the tourists out of their automobiles, out of their back-breaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs and onto their feet, onto the strange warmth and solidity of Mother Earth again? This is the problem which the Park Service should confront directly, not evasively, and which it cannot resolve by simply submitting and conforming to the automobile habit.

A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there.

Water, water, water... There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount...unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

Beyond atheism, nontheism. I am not an atheist but an earthiest. Be true to the earth.

Yes sir, yes madam, I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! like women! like human beings! and walk-walk-WALK upon our sweet and blessed land!

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.

I discovered that I was not opposed to mankind but only to man-centeredness, anthropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely for the sake of man; not to science, which means simply knowledge, but to science misapplied, to the worship of technique and technology, and to that perversion of science properly called scientism; and not to civilization but to culture.

My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving.

My friends and I live in the American SW because we love it, and love it for its own sake - not merely because it's the last region of the forty-eight states to be buried under asphalt and greed.

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

Lake Powell: storage pond, silt trap, evaporation tank and garbage dispose-all, a 180-mile-long incipient sewage lagoon.

Hayduke thought. Finally the idea arrived. He said, 'My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving. That's simple, right?

No one know precisely how sentient is a pinyon pine, for example, or to what degree such woody organisms can feel pain or fear, and in any case the road builders had more important things to worry about, but this much is clearly established as scientific face: a living tree, once uprooted, takes many days to wholly die.

Grow a beard, take a bath, burn a billboard

We always used to think it didn't matter, that when you mined out one area, or farmed it out, or overgrazed it, you could move to new country beyond the hills, keep moving West. But there are no new places to go anymore. The land is full. We have to stay where we are, take care of what we have. There isn't going to be anything else.

I think the evil is in the food, in the noise, in the crowding, in the stress, in the water, in the air.

We are caught," continued the good doctor, "in the iron treads of a technological juggernaut. A mindless machine. With a breeder reactor for a heart.