Quotes About Environment

since all organisms vary, and all reproduce themselves in greater numbers than can survive, there must always be competition between variants; in other words, the principle of natural selection, too, is universally applicable.

I believe in Natural Selection, not because I can prove in any single case that it has changed one species into another, but because it groups and explains well (as it seems to me) a host of facts in classification, embryology, morphology, rudimentary organs, geological succession and distribution.

Parece no haber más propósito en la variabilidad de los seres vivientes y en la acción de la selección natural que en la dirección en la sopla el viento.

Species that struggle to adapt to survive will become extinct

Mostly the colors of that land stuck to shades of red dirt and black cinders with a few dashes of sickly green. And yet look up, and the sun burned yellow and the sky rolled blue and deep like an argument that the world had not gone wrong at all.

so all you can hear is just general leaves?

There is an unalterable and widening gap between exterior and interior, symbol and content, form and function -a gap which is making the environment more and more inarticulate, impossible to understand and difficult to manipulate.

But there is a dirty little secret. Fusion is not clean.

a fusion power plant would produce a larger volume of radioactive waste than a standard nuclear power plant.

Fusion is a bit cleaner than fission, but it still presents a major waste problem.

It's an open secret. Fusion isn't clean, and it probably never will be.

There's a fire on the hillside just above Skyland and it's like to go wild if we

Less obviously, concern for the environment is a luxury good. Wealthy Americans are willing to spend more money to protect the environment as a fraction of their incomes than are less wealthy Americans. The same relationship holds true across countries; wealthy nations devote a greater share of their resources to protecting the environment than do poor countries.

We are conditioned by the national parks to link beauty and environmental value, a prejudice that makes as much sense as thinking attractive people form better friendships than plain people.

Now we have come full circle to the subtitle of this book: children learn by unlearning other languages. Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in the child's environment. And fitness, because we have competition, can be measured by the compatibility of a grammar with what a child hears in a particular linguistic environment. This theory of language takes both nature and nurture into account: nature proposes, and nurture disposes.

It's just hard to go from seeing elephants living their lives in the wild and not being bothered by humans, to seeing them put in a bunker every night and then being forced to take assholes like us on rides.

Today, nuclear energy costs about the same as coal, which is to say that it didn't change the economics of electricity one bit.*

Our march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet.25 At this rate, by 2030, only ten percent of the Earth's tropical forests will remain.

Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction.

A culture," the poet W. H. Auden observed, "is no better than its woods.

We extract one hundred tons of coal from the earth every two seconds in the United States, and about seventy percent of that coal comes from strip mines and mountaintop removal, which began in 1970.

Sometimes I think I might not have written 'The Age of Miracles' if I hadn't grown up in California, if I hadn't been exposed to its very particular blend of beauty and disaster, of danger and denial.

There's a level of ease that comes with working in Australia that can be missed working in other places.

I really missed the East Coast. I love living in Hawaii, but I miss the changing of seasons.