Quotes About Environment

We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated. There will never be another setup like the one in which we thrived. Ruin it and we will have lost ourselves, and that is craziness.

We must define a story which encourages us to make use of the place where we live without killing it, and we must understand that the living world cannot be replicated.

I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant—regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy—and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environment.

I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant—regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy—and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environment." —JOHN F. WATKINS, Principles of Behaviorism (1913)

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

Schumacher posited that people must make a serious shift in what they consider to be wealth and progress: "Ever-bigger machines, entailing ever-bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever-greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom.

As long as human beings are regarded as "bad", zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the "be less bad" approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species' roles in the world. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

William McDonough

product of service. Instead

valuable technical nutrients—cars, televisions, carpeting, computers, and refrigerators, for

Dow Chemical has experimented with this concept in Europe, and DuPont is taking up this idea vigorously.

Design is the first signal of human intention. When we look at plastics in our environment, if it's our intention to do these things then we must question our intentions. If it's not our intention, then what's our plan? The question becomes how we can behave in a way that works.

We humans have the ability to see beyond our species, and that ability confers a responsibility.

Laidlaw had seen that quality of arbitrarily shifting perspective before, always in people whose environment was putting them under pressure. It was as if they had been overtaken by the hardness of their experience and mugged by it, so that they lived the rest of their lives concussed.

The idea that commons can set and enforce limits on usage also seems improbable because it rejects the idea of humans having unbounded appetites. Ostrom

The challenge for us is to realise our unity with all life, and even with the inanimate world around us. The seas with their currents, the atmosphere and the continents of the earth are all in motion, stirring with their own kinds of life. Our malaise as a civilised people comes in large measure from our ability to distance ourselves from nature and from one another. A real therapy is one with a vision, not only of the individual person, but also of how the whole planet is to be healed.

Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

The Orchid and the Dandelion (La orquídea y el diente de león)

We don't inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.

The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.

Polite conversationalists leave no mark save the scars upon the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground.

We need the sea. We need a place to stand and touch and listen - to feel the pusle of the world as the surf rolls in.

I have not yet walked the forest trails, high meadows, snows and rocks of the Alpine Lakes area of the Cascades; even so, I do not feel myself a stranger there. Great many wild places of Earth I have not visited, and never shall be able to, but I have known some of them intimately, with delight, and thus claim citizenship of all the wild place of all the states and nations of all the continents and seas. From citizenship comes responsibility to care.