Quotes About Environment

Let's talk trash…. Only we humans make waste that nature can't digest.

Even smaller pieces are engulfed by inch-long krill; ant-size copepods; and filter-feeding salps, clams, oysters, and mussels. Large plankton feeders such as whale sharks and manta rays swallow gallons of water at a time, plastic and all. Whether at the large, medium, small, or ultra-small scale, ingested plastic lumps, clumps, pellets, or microscopic mites kill by physically obstructing, choking, clogging, or otherwise stopping up the passage of food.

One kind of blue-green bacteria, Prochlorococcus, is so abundant—about 100 octillion (1 octillion = 1027) are alive at any given moment—that it alone is responsible for about 20 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere. Put another way, this nearly invisible form of life generates the oxygen in one of every five breaths you take, no matter where on the planet you live.

A report from the National Academy of Sciences published five years later reported that over 6 billion kilograms (14 billion pounds) of garbage were deliberately dumped into the sea every year.

The problem is the magnitude of synthetic materials that are used briefly, then thrown away for eternity, thereby permanently changing the nature of the world.

But there's another, much darker, way in which Sylvia Earle helps us understand the size of the ocean. And that's to point out that, vast as it is, it's not so big that we can't screw it up.

There's something missing in how we inform the youngsters coming along about what matters in the world. We teach them the letters and numbers, but we fail to inform them about the importance of our connection with the living world

Only those who have learned to live on the land will find sanctuary

Nature tries to compensate, but is not always successful and thus our planet is now in dire straits and we humans are directly responsible for it.

It takes 25 years or so for a male sperm whale to reach the edge of social maturity, when it attains the size and weight of those I saw being butchered. It took less than four hours to transform those once vibrant creatures into the basic ingredients of candle wax, lubricating oils, cosmetics, fertilizer, ivory trinkets, and food for domesticated animals.

We are going to change the world from this point onward, one way or another. Either from what we do, or what we fail to do.

In virtue of our sin, we are, in short, like perfectly well-formed creatures living in an environment that is not good for us. The oxygen-rich environment, in which we were made to live, has now been transformed by our sin into a high altitude one that asphyxiates and enervates us.

You can take the people out of the city, but you can't take the soul — that remains here.

You cannot simply put something new into a place. You have to absorb what you see around you, what exists on the land, and then use that knowledge along with contemporary thinking to interpret what you see.

I believe that the way people live can be directed a little by architecture.

Nuclear power is one hell of a way to boil water.

of it was a plastic bottle

The American Dream was just then beginning to be defined by wealth at the expense of exploitable natural resources

If you, like me, are essentially a city person, then the chances are that when you imagine a wood you picture a simple thing: matching green trees in even rows, a soft carpet of dead leaves or pine needles, orderly as a child's drawing. Possibly those earnestly efficient man-made woods are in fact like that; I wouldn't know.

the evening wasn't a cold one, but it was starting to get dark and there was a sharp-edged, fidgety breeze prowling the garden, with no plants or long grass to soften it, tugging at branches and jabbing its way into corners.

Poet Gary Lawless writes: When the animals come to us, Asking for our help, Will we know what they are saying? When the plants speak to us In their delicate, beautiful language, Will we be able to answer them? When the planet herself Sings to us in our dreams, Will we be able to wake ourselves, and act?

Let's throw away our throwaway culture

The twentieth century was a horrible detour in the evolution of the human habitat. We were building more for cars' mobility than children's happiness. —Enrique Peñalosa, 2008

Gandhi said that we have enough resources for the need of us all, but not for the greed of us all," he recited. "And this is Thomas Kocherry's quotation: 'The life of the planet, and the dependent health of humanity, cannot be sacrificed for the greed of a few.