Quotes About Environment

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

This is suicidal... our home is the biosphere. That's a very thin layer of air, water and land where all life exists. It's fixed, it can't grow, and yet we cling to this idea that the economy can grow forever. And it must. Well, it can't.

The Martian atmosphere is very thin. It's like our atmosphere at 100,000 feet.

One of the most beautiful sights is when the rim of the Earth is bright on one side, and you see this defined line of the atmosphere. You see how close and thin it is. We've got to be careful. We've got to take care of this planet.

The one thing all humans share is that we all inhabit the same limited amount of real estate, which is Planet Earth.

I saw a lot of bad things happen by people I know and to people I know. There were a lot of different gangs around and sometimes you found yourself in conflict. I found myself attracting negative things because I was in a negative environment, I was pre-determining this stuff before it happened.

We are watching things happen with one degree changes in ocean temperature that we thought wouldn't happen until there were two or three degree changes in ocean temperature. These are facts.

I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?

I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read.

We can pay the ecological debt by changing economic models, and by giving up luxury consumption, setting aside selfishness and individualism, and thinking about the people and the planet Earth.

The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.

The problem of the environment is the extension of good housekeeping of the thinking woman.

My father is a geologist and he really thinks that scientists are going to save the world, so he wanted me to be one.

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

A third of our food comes from pollinating plants.

Food production has affected the environment more than any other activity humans have engaged in. Humanity devotes more land to food production than anything else - roughly a third of the surface area of the earth, much of which was once forest but has been converted by humans into farms or grazing lands.

We need to explore our own deserts and land, which need to be healed and managed on the planet itself. It is not the time to use and throw this planet and we need to explore deep within more than without. Space exploration should be used to quench human thirst.

I actually just bought a ranch, and I'm going grow as much of my own foods - I've got thirty chickens, and I'm going to try to live as sustainably as possible.

My mates Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have put together thirty one episodes of a really really nice podcast at Rice as part of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The 'Cultures of Energy Podcast' is so good!

Thirty percent of the Nation's energy comes off the gulf coast.

Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.

The point to have a child is to introduce them to this planet that is in some ways dying and hopefully, this new generation, these new untainted brains, will be the people to fix some of these things that this generation can't.

We've become slaves to words like 'local,' 'fresh,' and 'seasonal.' We all want to be Thomas Jefferson's agrarian hero, but sustainable food is a difficult beast.

I don't think we're crumbling as a civilization, but this is not our finest hour, and it's good to be mindful that we're all susceptible to fall and to look at what are the earmarks of a civilization on the wane. What are they - destruction of the environment? Conspicuous consumption? Heard of those?