Quotes About Environment

Chief Sealth, appalled at how his emerald garden had been trashed so quickly, wrote a letter in 1854 to President Franklin Pierce. "The whites, too, shall pass, perhaps sooner than the other tribes," he wrote with the help of a translator. "Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in waste.

The Pacific Northwest is simply this: wherever the salmon can get to. Rivers without salmon have lost the life source of the area.

Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister," a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance.

Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized

In Pinchot, he saw someone "who could relish, not run from a rainstorm," as he wrote. Just like himself.

In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl's or the logger's? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America.

The one-way plow would later be cursed as the tool that destroyed the plains because of its efficiency at ripping up grass.

He works twelve hours a day, with some of the world's stupidest animals, placed in an environment that is foreign to their native ground. He might as well be raising chickens in Rockefeller Center.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us," Leopold wrote later. "When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

One hundred million acres had lost most of its topsoil and nearly half had been "essentially destroyed" and could not be farmed again, Bennett said.

It is high time to realize that our responsibility to the coming millions is like that of parents to their children, and that in wasting our resources we are wronging our children.

Americans had become a force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than "the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history.

One chart showed how quickly the grass was overturned. In 1879, ten million acres were plowed. Fifty years later, the total was one hundred million acres. Grass was needed to hold the soil in place; it was nature's way of adapting to the basic conditions of the plains, the high wind and low rainfall.

the mist of early morning peels away to reveal the same sight, the untended casualties of Western man's war with the rain forest.

while the number of Cascade hikers has increased sixfold since 1960, nearly a third of the trail mileage has been lost to logging and neglect.

Of all the foes which attack the woodlands of North America, no other is so terrible as fire.

Leave it as it is. You cannot improve it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. Keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you.

I care to live only to entice people to look at nature's loveliness," Muir said

The larger question for the Northwest, where the cities are barely a hundred years old but contain three-fourths of the population, is whether the wild land can provide work for those who need it as their source of income without being ruined for those who need it as their source of sanity.

Naturalist Roger Tory Peterson has calculated that the Olympic Rain Forest is weighted down with more living matter than any other place on earth.

the Forest Service has punched 343,000 miles of logging roads into the vast stands of public trees—more than seven times the 44,000 miles of road built by the national highway system.

With a decrease in the number of pirates, there has been an increase in global warming over the same period. Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. Even more compelling: Somalia has the highest number of Pirates AND the lowest Carbon emissions of any country. Coincidence?

If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? I would not have a billboard, and I would take down every billboard that everybody else has put up.

The "aura of exclusivity" is really code for "bad atmosphere.