Quotes About Environment

The shock of the real.

The black rock was sharp-edged, hot, and hard as corundum; it seemed not merely alien but impervious to life. Yet on the southern face of almost every rock the lichens grew, yellow, rusty-brown, yellow-green, like patches of dirty paint daubed on the stone.

Hayduke smelled something foul in all this. A smoldering bitterness warmed his heart and nerves; the slow fires of anger kept his cockles warm, his hackles rising. Hayduke burned. And he was not a patient man.

Industrial Tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of those urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while.

Water, water, water.… There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

For there is a cloud on my horizon. A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand. Its name is Progress.

Keep the tourists out," some tourist from Salt Lake City has written. As fellow tourists we heartily agree.

There are no vacant lots in nature.

If God meant this here bulldozer to live He wouldn't of filled its tank with diesel fuel.

No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

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.

More likely the BLM or the Park Service will bypass our trail with an electrical chair lift for crippled tourists.

It is no longer easy, on the South Rim, to get away from the roar of motor traffic, except by descending into the canyon.

Koyaanisqatsi!

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

Each additional dam that is built on the Colorado, incidentally, reduces the quantity of usable water, because of unavoidable losses through evaporation and percolation into the porous sandstone containing the reservoirs.)

In my case, saving the world was only a hobby.

pagan and hedonistic people (thank God!), we are learning finally that the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches. Therefore let us behave accordingly.

Edward Abbey

We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we many never need to go there.

the lids, have taken on a coral-pink, the color of the dunes.

For myself I hold no preference among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous

There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

Simply breathing, in a place like this, arouses the appetite.