Quotes About Environment

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road--the one less traveled by--offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

five hundred new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.

The same thing happens in other situations. A generation or more ago, the towns of large areas of the United States lined their streets with the noble elm tree. Now the beauty they hopefully created is threatened with complete destruction as disease sweeps through the elms, carried by a beetle that would have only limited chance to build up large populations and to spread from tree to tree if the elms were only occasional trees in a richly diversified planting.

The fact that the tube worms have managed to live in the intertidal zone for perhaps millions of years is evidence of a sensitive adjustment of their way of life, on the one hand to conditions within the surrounding world of the rockweeds, on the other to vast tidal rhythms linked with the movements of earth, moon, and sun.

Between low water and the flotsam and jetsam of the high-tide mark, land and sea wage a never-ending conflict for possession.

We must change our philosophy, abandon our attitude of human superiority and admit that in many cases in natural environments we find ways and means of limiting populations of organisms in a more economical way than we can do it ourselves

The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.

At altitudes of 6000 to 16,000 feet, and with wind velocities reaching 45 miles an hour, many living insects have been taken.

Among the herbicides are some that are classified as 'mutagens' or agents capable of modifying the genes, the materials of heredity. 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?

Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

I'm mad at global warming for all the obvious reasons, but mostly I'm mad at it for ruining Christmas. This time of year is supposed to be about teeth-chattering, cold weather that necessitates coats, scarves, and mittens. Outside there should be see-your-breath air that offers the promise of sidewalks covered in snow, while inside, families drink hot chocolate by a roaring fire, huddled close together with their pets to keep warm.

there isn't even a pole at the North Pole, and if global warming continues, there won't be any ice, either.

I hope that global warming will go away. I hope that people won't be homeless. I hope that suffering will not exist. I want to believe that my hope is not in vain.

And though the blood of Abel had once cried out from the Earth, we had come now to a time when so much blood had been spilled over the millennia that the throat of the Earth was clotted and choked, and fresh blood could not raise a voice from it.

They excrete in the same water where they eat, and they eat in the semen-clouded water where they fornicate. Fish are disgusting.

We not-much-of-anything types don't worry about the cost of leaving a light on unnecessarily.

Even as I regarded those two men, I became aware of the flying beams of the spotlights, to the north-east, painting ephemeral infinity symbols across the pregnant clouds that increasingly commanded the sky, of the distant roller-coaster chain clacking through the ratchet angles of the guideway as cars full of riders climbed an incline toward the next long drop, of the dusty smell of the campground, and of the scent of rain pending.

What sucks the worst is…this world was a gift to us, and we broke it, and part of the deal is that if we want things right, we have to fix it ourselves. But we can't. We try, but we can't.

recorded everything from his observations regarding the ecology of the island to ruminations

According to the EPA, all the booming was—I quote—'only mechanical sonic devices that simulate

says, "If you're concerned about the environmental effects of the flatulence of cattle, don't be. It's a myth. What'll kill us all is the flatulence of politicians.

I feel claustrophobic. I need more than a couple of hours' light a day. I'm sick and tired of watching the sun set two hours after dawn. I need more light than this.

We drove through the Old Dominion University campus, where a small permanent lake has formed in the back corner of a huge parking lot. "You can't pave under water," he noted dryly, "so this obviously wasn't under water when this parking lot was paved.

We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.