ECOLOGY QUOTES

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“If we have a hope of really understanding our place in nature and of carving out a place for ourselves that is sustainable, it’s primarily because of the new level of communication. It used to be, ‘What you don’t have in your mind, you have on your shelf.’ But now we have the Web.”
~ Sylvia Earle

* We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth. As we learn how we fit into the greater scheme of things, and begin to understand how the system works, we can plan ahead, we can use the resources responsibly, to show some respect for this inheritance that goes back 4.6 billion years.
~ Sylvia Earle

* We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth.
~ Sylvia Earle

We are in trouble now, unless we deliberately take actions to take care of the sea, and make sure these systems continue to operate as they have for millions of years.
~ Sylvia Earle

"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait 'til oil and coal run out before we tackle that."
~ Thomas Edison (1847–1931)

 

Each person we add now disproportionately impacts on the environment and life-support systems of the planet."
-- Paul Ehrlich

"Since natural resources are finite, increased consumption must inevitably lead to depletion and scarcity."
-- Paul Ehrlich

"If you look at it historically, the rise of environmental consciousness has been extremely rapid. We're only 40 years into it. The trouble is, the environment has been going downhill far faster."
-- Paul Ehrlich

 

A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its beauty.
~ Albert Einstein

"The use of sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons, forasmuch as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession therof."
~ Elizabeth I of England

"To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The earth will continue to regenerate its life sources only as long as we and all the peoples of the world do our part to conserve its natural resources. It is a responsibility which every human being shares. Through voluntary action, each of us can join in building a productive land in harmony with nature."
~ Gerald Ford

* "When we protect the places where the processes of life can flourish, we strengthen not only the future of medicine, agriculture and industry, but also the essential conditions for peace and prosperity."
~ Harrison Ford

"Our health relies entirely on the vitality of our fellow species on Earth."
~ Harrison Ford

Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.
~ Michael Fox

* Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.
~ R. Buckminster Fuller

* We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
~ R. Buckminster Fuller

Our connection to nature grounds us, it makes us more spiritually aware. We must keep the legacy of nature materially alive for future generations.
-- Nelly Furtado

* There's enough on this planet for everyone's needs but not for everyone's greed.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

"The main lesson to be learned from the Love Canal crisis is that in order to protect public health from chemical contamination, there needs to be a massive outcry--a choir of voices--by the American people demanding change."
~ Lois Gibbs

"The citizens of Love Canal provided an example of how a blue-collar community with few resources can win against great odds (a multi-billion-dollar international corporation and an unresponsive government), using the power of the people in our democratic system."
~ Lois Gibbs

"It will take a massive effort to move society from corporate domination, in which industry's rights to pollute and damage health and the environment supersede the public's right to live, work, and play in safety. This is a political fight. The science is already there, showing that people's health is at risk. To win, we will need to keep building the movement, networking with one another, planning, strategizing, and moving forward. Our children's futures, and those of their unborn children, are at stake."
~ Lois Gibbs

 

* If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.
-- Danny Glover

* You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.
~ Jane Goodall

There would be very little point in my exhausting myself and other conservationist themselves in trying to protect animals and habitats if we weren’t at the same time raising young people to be better stewards.
~ Jane Goodall

* "We need a new environmental consciousness on a global basis. To do this, we need to educate people."
~ Mikhail Gorbachev

* "The key.. will be a new public awareness of how serious is the threat to the global environment. Those who have a vested interest in the status quo will probably continue to be able to stifle any meaningful change until enough citizens.. are willing to speak out."
~ Al Gore

The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves. We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies.
~ Al Gore

"We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love."
~ Stephen Jay Gould

 

* We are eternally linked not just to each other but our environment.
-- Herbie Hancock

* "People have to know that there are options available to us today. There is another way, and it is practical and applicable now."
-- Daryl Hannah

* It's really important to me to show the interconnectedness of things. I always try to illustrate how environmentalism, humanitarianism, animal rights -- all those things -- are one and the same.
-- Daryl Hannah

"I never had come up with a really profound and strong gesture -- nothing like Julia Butterfly's. So I figured the best thing I could do was live by my beliefs. That's probably the most profound thing that anybody can do."
-- Daryl Hannah

Anything you do sustainably feels so good that you're a full-on addict as soon as you try it. If you eat only vegetables and fruits that you grow yourself from your garden, or organic food, it tastes so much better and is so much better for you, you can't really go back."
-- Daryl Hannah

* "The future belongs to those who understand that doing more with less is compassionate, prosperous, and enduring, and thus more intelligent, even competitive."
~ Paul Hawken

* If there is to be an ecologically sound society, it will have to come from the grass roots up, not from the top down.
~ Paul Hawken

* "I feel more confident than ever that the power to save the planet rests with the individual consumer."
~ Denis Hayes

* "The sunshine that strikes American roads each year contains more energy than all the fossil fuels used by the entire world."
~ Denis Hayes

"An acre of windy prairie could produce between $4,000 and 10,000 worth of electricity per year – which is far more than the value of the land’s crop of corn or wheat."
~ Denis Hayes

"America has the technology and resources to meet all its energy needs while safeguarding the earth's climate. The urgent question now is, 'Do we have the will?' At least one city does, and I'm proud to live in it."
~ Denis Hayes

"Listen up, you couch potatoes: each recycled beer can saves enough electricity to run a television for three hours."
~ Denis Hayes

* We can dream together a dream of a better world, an ever-renewing, organic-based earth-community. I believe we can achieve a large part of it in our lifetime.
~ Randy Hayes

* Economic policy turns out to be the most important environmental policy.
~ Randy Hayes

I think our main foreign policy is economic policy but to think that economic policy is not environmental policy is to sort of, miss the point. You know you can't have economic development without impact on the biosphere.
~ Randy Hayes

* "I wake up in the morning asking myself what can I do today, how can I help the world today."
-- Julia Butterfly Hill

"Where the quality of life goes down for the environment, the quality of life goes down for humans."
~ George Holland

"The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done - challenging us to a realization of a new humanity."
~ Jean Houston
* "Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant."
~ Aldous Huxley

"While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually, it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil."
~ Thomas Jefferson

"The American people have a right to air that they and their children can breathe without fear."
~ Lyndon Johnson

If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."
~ President Lyndon B. Johnson

"No one has the right to use America's rivers and America's Waterways, that belong to all the people. as a sewer. The banks of a river may belong to one man or one industry or one State, but the waters which flow between the banks should belong to all the people."
~ Lyndon B. Johnson

 

Ecology Quotes

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World Water Day - March 22

Earth Day - April 22

 

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