Quotes About Stewardship

Our language, one of our most precious natural resources, deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes.

The planting is reserved for those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed. I only clear the ground for them. Clearing ground an piling stones is little enough, but it is better than sitting in idleness.

Over the long haul of life on this planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.

The destruction of our environment and resources cannot be stemmed unless the growth of the world's population is stemmed and ultimately reduced.

We believe that what we possess we don't ultimately own. God is merely entrusting it to us. And one of the conditions of that trust is that we share what we have with those who have less. So, if you don't give to people in need, you can hardly call yourself a Jew. Even the most unbelieving Jew knows that.

To permit a private or industrial actor to knowingly pollute our groundwater is unacceptable, and I do not believe in passing the buck to our children and grandchildren.

If we hand over a planet with an uncertain future, history will not forgive us.

But we are only termites on a planet and maybe when we bore too deeply into the planet there'll be a reckoning. Who knows?

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children

The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!

If we do not know how to respect the Mother Earth, we do not know how to respect ourselves.

Every farm woodland, in addition to yielding lumber, fuel and posts, should provide its owner a liberal education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested.

Ownership is a sine qua non of sustainable development.

But if not Kelso, then something else, because a free people must own the nation they live in.

It has taken about four billion years for living systems, mostly in the sea, to transform the lifeless ingredients of early Earth into the Eden that makes our lives possible, and less than a century for us to destabilize those rhythms.

Our near and distant predecessors might be forgiven for exterminating the last woolly mammoth, the ultimate dodo, the final sea cow, and the last living monk seal for lack of understanding the consequences of their actions. But who will forgive us if we fail to learn from past and present experiences, to forge new values, new relationships, a new level of respect for the natural systems that keep us alive?

What are you going to do with what you have been given?

We return to you, O earth, the things which you have given us willingly and most graciously; with our hearts, hands and minds, in the best way we know how.

Use your lives wisely, my friends, and conserve these precious freedoms for future generations.

It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.

Environmentalism isn't a discipline or specialty. It's a way of seeing our place in the world. And we need everybody to see the world that way. Don't think 'In order to make a difference I have to become an environmentalist.'

What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.

If we continue to address the issue of the environment where we live as though we're the only species that lives here, we'll create a disaster for ourselves.

So much of the habitat destruction and pollution is based on the simple principle that we somehow have been given free license over other species to degrade the planet.