Forests
QUOTES
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on *
for 8.5 X 11 PDF to print)
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| "Fair
Trade supports some of the most bio-diverse farming
systems in the world. When you visit a Fair Trade
coffee grower's fields, with the forest canopy overhead
and the sound of migratory songbirds in the air,
it feels like you're standing in the rainforest."
-- Professor Miguel Altieri, Leading expert and
author on agroecology |
The
American reading his Sunday paper in a state of
lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol
of the triumph of quantity over quality.... Whole
forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister
to our triviality.
~ Irving Babbitt |
"If
we lived in a desert and our lives depended on a
water supply that came out of a steel tube, we would
inevitably watch that tube and talk about it understandingly.
No citizen would need to be lectured about his duty
toward its care and spurred to help if it were in
danger. Teachers of civics in such a community might
develop a sense of public responsibility, not only
by describing the remote beginnings of the commonwealth,
but also how that tube got built, how long it would
last, how vital the intake might be if the rainfall
on the forested mountains nearby ever changed in
seasonal habit ot amount. It would be a most unimaginative
person, or a stupid one, who could not see the vital
relation between the mountains, the forests, that
tube and himself."
-- Isaiah Bowman |
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Acknowledging
the physical realities of our planet does not
mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In
fact, acknowledging these realities is the first
step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource
problems of the world -- water, food, minerals,
farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution
-- if we tackle them with courage and foresight.
~ Jimmy Carter
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Man
has been endowed with reason, with the power to
create, so that he can add to what he's been given.
But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer.
Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's
become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land
grows poorer and uglier every day.
~ Anton Chekhov |
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The
interminable forests should become graceful parks,
for use and delight.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Instead
of trying to be responsible for all the problems
in the world, we should take on what we love and
care about. Then we honor both our inner world
and the outer world at the same time. There’s
no separation between the two, and there is no
hesitation, no self-doubt. This will help us develop
great faith that others are taking care of their
piece. People who don’t know the details about
climate change may care deeply about the forests,
the animals, and the children. It is very important
that we share, not only our merit, but also the
responsibilities. Somehow we have to relieve ourselves
of the enormity, which is so debilitating.
~ Paul Hawken
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It
doesn't take a genius to pump up the GNP [of a
developing country] by burning down rainforests,
using slave labor and social repression to keep
things in place.
-- Hazel
Henderson
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"Fairness
is an efficiency parameter if we look at the whole
global civilization. It is not an efficient way
of meeting human needs if one billion people starve
while another billion have excess. It would be more
efficient to distribute resources so that at least
vital needs were met everywhere. Otherwise, for
example, if kids are starving somewhere, dad goes
out to slash and burn the rain forest to feed them
-- and so would I if my kids were dying. And this
kind of destruction is everyone's problem, because
we live in the same ecosphere."
-- Karl-Henrik Robert
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But
when you have bad governance, of course, these
resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested,
there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion.
I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these
issues become linked to governance, to corruption,
to dictatorship.
~ Wangari Maathai
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So
join with me in this campaign. Lend me your strength
and your support-and together, we will call America
home to the ideals that nourished us in the beginning.
From secrecy, and deception in high places, come
home, America...
From
military spending so wasteful that it weakens
our nation, come home, America.
From the entrenchment of special privilege and
tax favoritism-
From the waste of idle hands to the joy of useful
labor-
From the prejudice of race and sex-
From the loneliness of the aging poor and the
despair of the neglected sick, come home, America.
Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream.
Come home to the conviction that we can move our
country forward.
Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer
world.
And let us be joyful in the homecoming,
for:' this land is your land, this land is my
land.
From California to the New York Islands.
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters.
This land was made for you and me.'
May God grant us the wisdom to cherish this good
land and to meet the great challenge that beckons
us home. This is the time.
-- George McGovern
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"Each
generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought
to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards
as we have exhausted and consumed."
~ J. Sterling Morton,
Founder of Arbor Day
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The
clearest way into the Universe is through a forest
wilderness. ~ John
Muir
"...Unfortunately,
MAN is in the woods, and waste and pure destruction
are making rapid headway. If the importance of
forests were at all understood, even from an economic
standpoint, their preservation would call forth
the most watchful attention of government." ~
John Muir
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"The
battle we have fought, and are still fighting
for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict
between right and wrong, and we cannot expect
to see the end of it ... So we must count on watching
and striving for these trees, and should always
be glad to find anything so surely good and noble
to strive for."
~ John Muir
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Federal
policy over the past century has largely failed
to promote an energy system based on safe, secure,
economically affordable, and environmentally benign
energy sources. The tax code, budget appropriations,
and regulatory processes overwhelmingly have been
used to subsidize dependence on fossil fuels and
nuclear power. The result: increased sickness
and premature deaths, depleted family budgets,
acid rain destruction of lakes, forests, and crops,
oil spill contamination, polluted rivers and loss
of aquatic species and the long-term peril of
climate change and radioactive waste dumps–not
to mention a dependency on external energy supplies.
~ Ralph Nader
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The
forest is not a resource for us, it is life itself.
It is the only place for us to live. --
Evaristo Nugkuag
Ikanan
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Sleeping
in the Forest
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts,
her pockets full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before,
a stone on the riverbed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but
my thoughts,
and they floated light as moths among the branches of
the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around
me,
the insects, and the birds who do their work in the
darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom.
By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into
something better.
--
Mary Oliver
"What
may be possible for a minority of humankind, albeit
at great cost, simply cannot work for the humankind.
Our kind of progress depends on lacerating the Earth,
on gouging out its riches, on stripping is life-sustaining
skin of soil and forest, on poisoning its pure air,
on defecating copiously in its pure water... the
single most important indicator of environmental
decline is the extent to which the damage done is
reversible. The most heinous ecological crime of
all is for any one generation so seriously to assault
the web of life that the damage done is literally
irreversible for every generation that follows."
~ Jonathon Porritt |
"We
must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren
and children yet to be born. We must protect the
forests for those who can't speak for themselves
such as the birds, animals, fish and trees."
-- Qwatsinas (Hereditary Chief Edward Moody), Nuxalk
Nation |
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"A nation that destroys it's soils destroys itself.
Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the
air and giving fresh strength to our people."
~ Franklin
D. Roosevelt |
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If
there is any one duty which more than another
we owe it to our children and our children's children
to perform at once, it is to save the forests
of this country, for they constitute the first
and most important element in the conservation
of the natural resources of this country.
-- Theodore
Roosevelt
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--It's
time we stopped turning up our noses at the nation's
garbage dumps and started appreciating them for
what they really are -- the municipal mines, forests,
oil wells and energy sources of the future!
-- Max Spendlove |
Something
will have gone out of us as a people if we ever
let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we
permit the last virgin forests to be turned into
comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive
the few remaining members of the wild species into
zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear
air and dirty the last clean streams and push our
paved roads through the last of the silence, so
that never again will Americans be free in their
own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks
of human and automotive waste.
~Wallace Stegner |
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