Quotes About Environment

During the second decade of the twenty-first century, worldwide applications of nitrogenous fertilizers averaged about 110 million tons a year, and losing half this mass is releasing more than 50 million tons of the element (in reactive compounds, mostly as nitrates and ammonia) into the environment.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century there was considerable interest in ethanol (ethyl alcohol, C2H6O or CH3CH2OH), both as a car fuel and as a gasoline additive.

DDT now belongs to the category of inventions that were not just welcome but seen as truly transformative, only to be relegated to the class of undesirable advances.

The verdict was obvious: CFCs were staying in the atmosphere, and because of their inertia nearly their entire post-1930 output was accumulating aloft. But did the presence of these compounds, as Lovelock's group concluded, pose "no conceivable hazard" because they did "not disturb the environment"—or could their accumulation have undesirable consequences?

Some measurable effects appeared soon: as the lead phase-out proceeded, the median lead concentration in American children decreased by nearly 80 percent between 1976 and 1994, and by 2015 it was only about 5 percent of the mid-1970s level.

This trifecta turned the book into the best-known nonfiction work of the 1960s. Silent Spring presented the use of DDT as one of the most consequential human interferences in the natural order of things, and the book was intended to make the widest possible public impact.

she made DDT the centerpiece of the book's lengthy indictment: throughout the book Carson refers to it nearly two hundred times.

Remember, your company is a living organism that needs to survive in an environment that's always changing. To thrive, it has to be able to adapt. Charles Darwin found that survival is determined by the ability to adapt to circumstances.

All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.

There are no bad plants or bad men. There is only bad husbandry.

was so hot that every now and then a bird fell from the sky, landing with a little thump on the hard-packed dirt. The chickens sat in dusty heaps on the ground, their heads lolled forward, and the last two cows stood together, too hot and tired to move. A listless breeze moved through the farm, plucking at the empty clothesline.

Three years ago, I began writing this novel about hard times in America: the worst environmental disaster in our history; the collapse of the economy; the effect of massive unemployment. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the Great Depression would become so relevant in our modern lives, that I would see so many people out of work, in need, frightened for the future.

damage the earth is to damage your children. —WENDELL BERRY, FARMER AND POET

Snow is a poor substitute for soil

April 14 had been dubbed Black Sunday. Apparently three hundred thousand tons of Great Plains topsoil had flown into the air that day. More soil than had been dug up to build the Panama Canal. The dirt had fallen to the ground as far away as Washington, D.C.

Sometimes they called themselves carbon farmers, knowing that it was carbon that was making their soils richer, moister, and darker.

if only 11 percent of the world's cropland—land that is typically not in use—improved its community of soil microorganisms as much as Johnson and his colleagues did in their test plots, the amount of carbon sequestered in the soil would offset all our current emissions of carbon dioxide.

Maybe that is the one real division between men: wood men and desert men.

more than half of all houses in Mexico City are located in unhealthy, unsafe areas.

most chilangos (Mexico City inhabitants) will die slow deaths from diseases related to long-term exposure to their environment. Which is just another way of saying that living in Mexico City long enough will kill you.

chilangos tend to throw their used toilet paper into wastebaskets instead of flushing them down the drain to keep from clogging up the pipes, and this shit-smeared paper winds up in the city dumps and eventually it too goes airborne.

Mexico City has been ranked amongst the worst cities in the world in terms of urban planning,

Every psychological event depends upon the state of the person and at the same time on the environment, although their relative importance is different in different cases

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.