Quotes About Environment

The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea, and sky and their amazing life.

I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of skeptically and dictatorially. E. B. WHITE

In the fish world many things are told by sound waves.

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society.

It was a house-that-Jack-built sequence, in which the large carnivores had eaten the smaller carnivores, that had eaten the herbivores, that had eaten the plankton, that had absorbed the poison from the water.

To dispose first and investigate later is an invitation to disaster, for once radioactive elements have been deposited at sea they are irretrievable. The mistakes that are made now are made for all time.

Carson's thesis that we were subjecting ourselves to slow poisoning by the misuse of chemical pesticides that polluted the environment may seem like common currency now, but in 1962 Silent Spring contained the kernel of social revolution.

Incidents like the eastern Illinois spraying raise a question that is not 9nly scientific but moral. The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.

Such plants are weeds only to those who make a business of selling and applying chemicals.

They should not be called 'insecticides', but 'biocides'.

The question of chemical residues on the food we eat is a hotly debated issue. The existence of such residues is either played down by the industry as unimportant or is flatly denied. Simultaneously, there is a strong tendency to brand as fanatics or cultists all who are so perverse as to demand that their food be free of insect poisons. In all this cloud of controversy, what are the actual facts?

It is only within the moment of time represented by the twentieth century that one species - man - has acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world, and it is only within the past twenty-five years that his power has achieved such magnitude that it endangers the whole earth and its life. The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of the air, earth, rivers, and seas with dangerous, and even lethal, materials.

Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

Although man's record as a steward of the natural resources of the earth has been a discouraging one, there has long been a certain comfort in the belief that the sea, at least, was inviolate, beyond man's ability to change and to despoil. But this belief, unfortunately, has proved to be naïve.

Carson's writing initiated a transformation in the relationship between humans and the natural world and stirred an awakening of public environmental consciousness. It

What sets the new synthetic insecticides is their enormous biological potency.

The chemists' ingenuity in devising insecticides has long ago outrun biological knowledge of the way these poisons affect the living organism.

We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

I]t is simply impossible to predict the effects of lifetime exposure to chemical and physical agents that are not part of the biological experience of man.

The ultimate answer is to use less toxic chemicals so that the public hazard from their misuse is greatly reduced.

As Albert Schweitzer has said, "Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.

Every grain of sand or silt carried out by the rivers and deposited at sea displaces a corresponding amount of water.