Quotes About Environment

As the economist Herman Daly once put it: "The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.

even a modest dilution of the ocean's salt content—from increased melting of the Greenland ice sheet, for instance—could disrupt the cycle disastrously. The

There is a critical threshold where the natural biosphere stops buffering us from the effects of our emissions and actually starts to amplify them.

3.5 billion years ago, when the Moon was much closer, volcanic eruptions commonplace (because of the thinness of the crust), meteor impacts routine and the air thick with acidic vapours. Remarkably, it was in such an unpromising environment that life first got going.

report in The Economist as much as 97 per cent of the world's plant and animal species may still await discovery. Of

If all the ice sheets melted, sea levels would rise by 60 metres.

can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean—but if you are not in a hurry it is marvellously efficient. Perhaps

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In

the main expressed goal for oceanographers during International Geophysical Year, 1957/8, was to study "the use of ocean depths for the dumping of radioactive wastes." This wasn't a secret assignment, you understand, but a proud public boast. In

Before this dumping was halted in the 1990s, the United States had dumped many hundreds of thousands of drums into about fifty ocean sites—almost fifty thousand of them in the Fallarones alone.

I took a train to Liverpool. they were having a festival when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the other wise bland and neglected landscape.

The nineteenth century was already a chilly time. For two hundred years Europe and North America in particular had experienced a Little Ice Age, as it has become known, which permitted all kinds of wintry events—frost fairs on the Thames, ice-skating races along Dutch canals—that are mostly impossible now.

It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

To agree with Ingold is no to say that everything must be local first and last, nor to deny that there are environmental problems on a planetary scale. It is to say that they are not the planet's problems. They are ours.

A quick Google search reveals there to be seven, ten, five, four or eight 'years to save the planet', depending on your headline writer and expert of choice ('Eleven years to save the planet' seems at the moment a rallying cry still up for grabs).

In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska's glaciers? None.

Looked at from above, west London isn't so much a city as a forest with buildings.

And to see a plant grow armed with the knowledge that it does so out of thin air – that is, after all, where the carbon that makes up most of its mass comes from – is to realise that something else must be restoring that nutritive goodness to the atmosphere.

Very little arrives (those asteroid impacts are few and far between), and only a whisper of gas escapes. Everything else must be endlessly recycled: and so it is. The rain becomes the ocean and the ocean becomes the rain, the mountains are ground down to cover the sea-floors with silt, ancient silts rise up to make new mountains.

The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch. A survey of subway trains in Boston found that metal poles are a fairly hostile environment for microbes. Where microbes thrive is in the fabrics on seats and on plastic handgrips. The most efficient method of transfer for germs, it seems, is a combination of folding money and nasal mucus.

That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places–on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit. You even see clumps of flowery life growing on the sides of abandoned warehouses and old viaducts. If all the humans in the UK vanished tomorrow, Britain would still be in flower.

Britain still has the most reliably beautiful countryside of anywhere in the world. I would hate to be part of the generation that allowed that to be lost.

No one knows, because it is essentially impossible to determine, to what extent environmental factors contribute to cancers now. More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and by one calculation 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans.

Yet in clean Hong Kong asthma rates are 15 percent, while in heavily polluted Guangzhou they are just 3 percent, exactly the opposite of what one would expect.