Quotes About Environment

Our understandable wish to preserve the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence - that is to wish to preserve all of its humble house - holds and neighbourhoods.

we must not speak or think of the land alone or of the people alone, but always and only of both together. If we want to save the land, we must save the people who belong to the land. If we want to save the people, we must save the land the people belong to.

The tractor's arrival had signaled, among other things, agriculture's shift from an almost exclusive dependence on free solar energy to a total dependence on costly fossil fuel.

And yet, if we are ever again to have a world fit and pleasant for little children, we are surely going to have to draw the line where it is not easily drawn. We are going to have to learn to give up things that we have learned (in only few years, after all) to 'need.

The environment," as we call it, is intimately with us. We're in it. It's in us. But also we are it, and it is us.

And every day I am confronted by the question of what inheritance I will leave. What do I have that I am using up? For it has been our history that each generation in this place has been less welcome to it than the last. There has been less here for them. At each arrival there has been less fertility in the soil, and a larger inheritance of destructive precedent and shameful history.

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe.

Industrial medicine is as little interested in ecological health as is industrial agriculture. (Health Is Membership, pg. 98)

In the coal counties, east and west, they were strip-mining without respect for the past or mercy to the future, and the reign of a compunctionless national economy was established everywhere.

God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it. It is His world; He has never relinquished title to it. And He has never revoked the conditions, bearing on His gift to us of the use of it, that oblige us to take excellent care of it. If God loves the world, then how might any person of faith be excused for not loving it or justified in destroying it?

the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in.

But it seemed to me that even if everything had been changed, I would have recognized it by the look of the sky.

The more local and settled the culture, the better it stays put, the less the damage. It is the foreigner whose road of excess leads to a desert.

The earth, which we all have in common, is our deepest bond, and our behavior toward it cannot help but be an earnest of our consideration for each other and for our descendants. To corrupt or destroy the natural environment is an act of violence not only against the earth but also against those who are dependent on it, including ourselves. To waste the soil is to cause hunger, as direct an aggression as an armed attack; it is an act of violence against the future of the human race.

But the environmental crisis rises close to home. Every time we draw a breath, every time we drink a glass of water, we are suffering from it. And more important, every time we indulge in, or depend on, the wastefulness of our economy - and our economy's first principle is waste - we are causing the crisis. Nearly every one of us, nearly every day of his life, is contributing directly to the ruin of this planet.

A man who is willing to undertake the discipline and the difficulty of mending his own ways is worth more to the conservation movement than a hundred who are insisting merely that the government and the industries mend their ways.

In other words, if you are fearful of the destruction of the environment, then learn to quit being an environmental parasite.

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us.

it is by the place we've got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.

We have, in fact, been turning our country into an economy as fast as possible, and we have been doing so by an unaccounted squandering of its actual, its natural and its cultural, wealth.

Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.

Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless.

No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its own sources. Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements destroy the fields.

The faith that limitless technological progress will finally solve the problems of limitless contamination seems to depend upon some sort of neo-religion.