Quotes About Environment

What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us.

The average food item on a U.S. grocery shelf has traveled farther than most families go on their annual vacations.

Each food items in a typical U.S. meal has traveled an average of 1,500 miles....If every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce we would reduce our country's oil consumption by over 1.1 million barrels of oil every week.

I'd forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn't just stop at eye level.

The color brown, I realized, is anything but nondescript. It comes in as many hues as there are colors of earth, with is commonly presumed infinite.

Most people lived so far from it, they thought you could just choose, carnivore or vegetarian, without knowing that the chemicals on grain and cotton killed far more butterflies and bees and bluebirds and whippoorwills than the mortal cost of a steak or a leather jacket.

Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm. It's a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses. The green spaces surrounding your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you.

It only we could recover faith in a seed - and in all the other complicated marvels that can't fit in a sound bite. Then we humans might truly know the glory of knowing our place.

For God's sake, man," Ovid nearly shouted, "the damn globe is catching fire, and the islands are drowning. The evidence is staring them in the face.

Barbara Kingsolver

from an excerpt by her daughter Camille] Living on the land that has grown my food gives me a sense of security I'm lucky to have. Feeling safe isn't so easy for people my age, who face odious threats like global warming, overpopulation, and chemical warfare in our future. But even as the world runs out of fuel and the ice caps melt, I will know the real sources of my sustenance. My college education may or may not land me a good job down the road, but my farm education will serve me.

The conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners. Our culture is not acquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're juts particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.

Every kind of weather is intensified by warming.

There is nothing boring about the prospect of extinction.

we've learned that some of our favorite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the threats. Now the reforms required of us are more systematic, and nobody seems to want to go first. (To be more precise, the U.S.A. wants to go last.)

A quick way to improve food-related fuel economy would be to buy a quart of motor oil and drink it.

I avoided the employee smoking room aka drug-exchange HQ, and found no real down side to the job [in the produce department]. People buying apples and green beans usually have some degree of joy in their hearts. - p. 513

My favored mulching method is to cover the ground between rows of plants with a year's worth of our saved newspapers; the paper and soy-based ink will decompose by autumn. Then we cover all that newsprint—comics, ax murderers, presidents, and all—with a deep layer of old straw. It is grand to walk down the rows dumping armloads of moldy grass glop onto the faces of your less favorite heads of state: a year in review, already starting to compost.

Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There's no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

Putana thalassa pou se gamoun ta psaria." Meaning, "whore ocean where all the fish fuck each other.

Our culture is not unacquainted with the idea of food as a spiritually loaded commodity. We're just particular about which spiritual arguments we'll accept as valid for declining certain foods. Generally unacceptable reasons: environmental destruction, energy waste, the poisoning of workers. Acceptable: it's prohibited by a holy text.

Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there's a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it's inferior.

Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot.

by This Organic Life, a compelling book by Joan Dye Gussow that tells how, and more important why, she aspired