Quotes About Environment

The space itself, your home, naturally has a message and intention.

We are literally releasing the carbon dioxide that nature had locked up over a hundred million [years] down below the Earth. And we're releasing all that carbon dioxide now at a rate a million times faster [than it accumulated].

It's estimated that the Arctic, within seven years and maybe as soon as 2015, will have its first ice-free summer in the last 700,000 years (keep in mind that humans have only been on this planet for 165,000 years). Earlier projections predicted ice-free summers as far out in the future as 2080.

Most Americans — 78% to be exact — drive fewer than 40 miles per day. Which means that for more than three-quarters of us, we really don't need gasoline at all. Electric cars have an easy minimum range of 100 miles and a typical range of closer to 200 miles. And the technology is just getting started. We fight wars all over the world for oil, and we don't even need it. That, in and of itself, is insane.

Refuting the simplistic statement that "ADHD is caused by bad parenting" avoids a more complex argument (given in chapter 7) that adverse factors such as physical abuse or trauma in a child's home environment can impair neurological development and be linked to ADHD symptoms.

We study better in hostile surroundings than in hospitable ones, a student is always well advised to choose a hostile place of study rather than a hospitable one, for the hospitable place will rob him of the better part of his concentration for his studies, the hostile place on the other hand will allow him total concentration, since he must concentrate on his studies to avoid despairing

Nature, not yet polluted by human beings, hence his early rising.

The destiny of humans cannot be separated from the destiny of earth.

We might summarize our present human situation by the simple statement: that in the 20th century, the glory of the human has become the desolation of the Earth and now the desolation of the Earth is becoming the destiny of the human. From here on, the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities will be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually-enhancing human/Earth relationship.

A degraded habitat will produce degraded humans. If there is to be any true progress, then the entire life community must progress.

O]ur human economy is derivative from the Earth economy. To glory in a rising Gross Domestic Product with an irreversibly declining Earth Product is an economic absurdity.

The divine communicates to us primarily through the language of the natural world. Not to hear the natural world is not to hear the divine.

And we feel that those characters couldn't be anywhere but where they are, that those characters couldn't say the things they say if they were uprooted and planted in, say, Minnesota or Scotland.

To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.

Courage can be developed. But it cannot be nurtured in an environment that eliminates all risks, all difficulty, all dangers.

The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture. --The Fruit Hunters

I wish I was a despot that I might save the noble, the beautiful trees that are daily falling sacrifice to the cupidity of their owners, or the necessity of the poor. The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder.

Brute animals are the most healthy, and they are exposed to all weather, and of men, those are healthiest who are the most exposed.

The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder, it pains me to an unspeakable degree.

These artists pay little attention to an encircling present that bears no direct relation to the world of work in which they live, and they therefore see in it nothing more than an indifferent framework for life, either more or less favorable to production.

There is a whole culture in the United States—a growing one, it seems—that consciously walls out facts it doesn't want to know. These facts cluster together: evolution by natural selection; climate change; our society's growing recognition of equal rights for all persons; the citizen's responsibilities to the citizenry; the damage humans have done to natural systems and our duty to try to heal them.

In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated.

Like all life, it grows sick and dies when it is uprooted from its proper element.

Philosophick Work, to proceed at all smartly, wouldn't you agree, requires a controll'd working-space.