Quotes About Environment

That study confirmed Keller's point: that a reusable grocery bag made of non-woven polypropylene plastic would have to be used at least eleven times to have a lower carbon footprint than using disposable single-use grocery bags. There were other comparisons in the study, too: Using a paper bag three times would do the trick, while it would take 131 trips to the market with a cotton bag to have a lower carbon footprint - which meant the material used for a reusable bag was critical.

There are, in short, a multitude of ways for trash to escape and plastic to go missing. But there is only one ultimate end point for this wild trash: the greatest future, the biggest surface, the deepest chasm, the broadest desert and the largest burial ground on the planet. It's the ocean.

No matter where you are, there's no getting over it, no getting away from it," he has said. "It's a plastic ocean now … We're putting everything in the ocean on a plastic diet.

Half the oxygen we breathe emanates from microscopic phytoplankton sloshing around the surface of the ocean. After literally billions of years of performing that essential, priceless service, those vital organisms now must swim and feed and survive in a sea of plastic soup. Figuring out what's up with those organisms is, Goldstein suggests, a pretty vital matter. If we are inadvertently killing them off, the result could be far less visible, but even more devastating, than deforestation.

Refuse. Because every time you say yes, you are inviting more to be made. You have created demand for more waste. So we refuse all of that.

Explicitly connecting how people describe the natural world in different ways is a top conservation priority.

Although environmental factors do influence the course of ADD over a lifetime, most practitioners in the field now agree that the characteristic problems of people with ADD stem from neurobiological malfunctioning

Destroying forest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

Despite all of our pretenses and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world. Millions of years of evolution are indelibly encoded in our genes. History without the wildlands is no history at all.

The human impact on biodiversity, to put the matter as briefly as possible, is an attack on ourselves.

A typical battlefield of this struggle is Hawaii, America's most deceptively beautiful state. For most residents and visitors, it seems an unspoiled island paradise. In actuality it is a killing field of biological diversity. When

if our genes are inherited and our environment is a train of physical events set in motion before we were born, how can there be a truly independent agent within the brain? The agent itself is created by the interaction of the genes and the environment.

Natural selection, the driving force of biological evolution in both individual and group selection, is captured in a single phrase: mutation proposes, the environment disposes.

no species, ours included, possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by its genetic history. Species may have vast potential for material and mental progress but they lack any immanent purpose or guidance from agents beyond their immediate environment or even an evolutionary goal toward which their molecular architecture automatically steers them.

phenotypic plasticity

The International Energy Agency insists that somehow humanity must plan to leave most of the world's proven oil and gas reserves in the ground to blunt otherwise ruinous climate change, adding that "no more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050.

if we save the living world, we will also automatically save the physical world, because in order to achieve the first we must also achieve the second. But if we save only the physical world, which appears our present inclination, we will ultimately lose them both.

The agent causing the most immediate damage to species in fresh water are dams, great boosters of local economies but unfortunately chief demons of aquatic habitat destruction. Their

Annie Dillard was a pioneer in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Among other notable examples are David M. Carroll's Following the Water: A Hydromancer's Notebook (2009); David George Haskell's The Forest Unseen (2012); and Dave Goulson's A Buzz in the Meadow: The Natural History of a French Farm (2015).

The human species is, in a word, an environmental hazard. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere.

In Hebei Province, in the heart of China's northern grain belt, the average water level in the deep aquifer is dropping nearly three meters a year. Underground

Who are we to destroy the planet's Creation? Each species around us is a masterpiece of evolution, exquisitely adapted to its environment. Species existing today are thousands to millions of years old. Their genes, having been tested by adversity over countless generations, engineer a staggeringly complex mix of biochemical devices that promote the survival and reproduction of the organisms carrying them.

biophilia, which I will be so bold as to define as the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes.

Some psychiatrists even see a kind of twisted rationale in the mind of the schizophrenic: the individual tries to escape from his intolerable social environment by creating a private inner world. But the fact remains that certain genes predispose individuals toward schizophrenia. Individuals possessing them can develop the pathology while growing up in the midst of normal, supportive families.