ECOLOGY QUOTES

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"Modern Society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyles."
~ Pope John Paul II (Polish Pope. 1920-2005)

The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.
~ Ross Perot

 

* The environmental movement has led some of the most successful global campaigns in terms of raising public and political consciousness about the relationship of environment and development and offering alternatives for better governance at all levels from community to the international arena.
~ Michele Perrault

The philosophy that I have worked under most of my life is that the serious study of natural history is an activity which has far-reaching effects in every aspect of a person’s life. It ultimately makes people protective of the environment in a very committed way. It is my opinion that the study of natural history should be the primary avenue for creating environmentalists.
~ Roger Tory Peterson

Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we'll soon be in trouble.
~ Roger Tory Peterson

* Not all is doom and gloom. We are beginning to understand the natural world and are gaining a reverence for life - all life.
~ Roger Tory Peterson

Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.
~ Channing E. Phillips

"The purpose of conservation: The greatest good to the greatest number of people for the longest time."
~ Gifford Pinchot, first Director of the U.S. Forest Service

"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

I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
~ Sir George Porter

* "For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports."
~ Sandra Postel

* "Water is finite and we have not done a great job of managing it in the past."
~ Sandra Postel

 

"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

It's incredible to see labor unions and environmentalists getting together to stop the corporate mentality that destroys both jobs and the environment.
-- Bonnie Raitt

* I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?
~ Robert Redford

"We’ve poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We’re running out of resources and we are running out of time."
~ Robert Redford

"If we want energy security, then we have to reduce our appetite for fossil fuels. There's no other way. Other issues may crowd the headlines, but this is our fundamental challenge. Big challenges require bold action and leadership. To get the United States off fossil fuels in this uneasy national climate of terrorism and conflict in the Persian Gulf, we must treat the issue with the urgence and persistance it deserves. The measure of our success will be the condition on which we leave the world for the next generation.
~ Robert Redford

"To secure our environmental legacy for future generations, we must find ways to reconcile humanity more satisfactorily with the natural systems upon which all human life and civilizations depend. We must recognize that the natural systems of which we are part have an intrinsic worth transcending narrow utilitarian values. They must be preserved for their own sake. No philosopher or religious thinker has been more sensitive to this intimate relationship between humanity and nature than St. Francis of Assisi. The powerful contemporary environmental tradition of preservation, of reverence for wilderness and protection for all living things - the ideal that sees, as John Muir said, ‘in God’s wildness... the hope of the world’ - virtually began with St. Francis."
-- William K. Reilly, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.
~ Jeremy Rifkin

"I used to think of the environment as trees and blue sky. Then I learned that for some people, the environment is gangs and concrete. All the issues that we face are connected. Worldwide, ecosystems are being destroyed, and indigenous peoples are losing their homelands and their entire way of life. Three out of every five African-Americans and Latinos in the US lives in a community with a toxic waste site. As long as pollution is being produced, it's going to go somewhere, and as long as there are marginalized communities where land is cheaper and the people don't have the time or the money to fight back, polluters will have a place to deposit toxins. As long as people and the planet are being exploited, and billions of dollars are being made precisely because laborers and the environment are being abused and used up, there will be children going hungry and ecological destruction. As long as war and violence are in our hearts and our streets as well as in our nations, as long as corporate greed and unsustainable consumption are at the forefront of our economies, no child will be born into a truly safe, peaceful or loving world."
~ Ocean Robbins

* As long as people and the planet are being exploited, and billions of dollars are being made precisely because laborers and the environment are being abused and used up, there will be children going hungry and ecological destruction.
~ Ocean Robbins

* If we think systematically, we will stop asking, "How much is nature worth?" We will know that we are a piece of nature ourselves.
~ Karl-Henrik Robčrt

* “It’s very important that we expand our use of clean energy and make a long-term commitment to it.
-- Julia Roberts

“It’s very important that we expand our use of clean energy and make a long-term commitment to it. Biodiesel and ethanol are better for the environment and for the air we breathe.The use of biodiesel is a positive step toward minimizing pollutive emissions and greenhouse gases. By focusing on school buses, we can affect the health and wellbeing of the people most susceptible to that pollution – our children – today.”
-- Julia Roberts

* ...conservation of land and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

* "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

There is nothing so American as our national parks. The scenery and wildlife are native. The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. The parks stand as the outward symbol of this great human principle.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men.
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it."
~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1903

* "The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired in value."
~ Theodore Roosevelt

To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
~ Theodore Roosevelt

"I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates."
~ Theodore Roosevelt

"I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us."
~ Theodore Roosevelt

The function of our Government is to insure to all its citizens, now and hereafter, their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we of this generation destroy the resources from which our children would otherwise derive their livelihood, we reduce the capacity of our land to support a population, and so either degrade the standard of living or deprive the coming generations of their fight to life on this continent.

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

You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

* Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.
~ William Ruckelshaus, 1st EPA Administrator

You go into a community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in favor of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20 minutes a year to having their car emissions inspected, they will vote 80 to 20 against it. We are a long way in this country from taking individual responsibility for the environmental problem.
~ William Ruckelshaus, 1st EPA Administrator

"I am drawn to the wild not because it is wild but because it is sensible, logical, ordered, stable, resilient. Wild nature is everything we're struggling to regain."
~ Carl Safina

The only durable community is the one that embraces the whole planet, wild and tame . . .
-- Scott Russel Sanders, Voyagers

"A Healthy Ecology is the Basis for a Healthy Economy."
~ Claudine Schneider, U.S. Representative

* "Man talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side."
~ E. F. Schumacher

* "We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature..."
~ E.F. Schumacher

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
~ E.F. Schumacher

By means of trees, wildlife could be conserved, pollution decreased and the beauty of our landscapes enhanced. This is the way, or at least one of the ways, to spiritual, moral, and cultural regeneration.
~ E.F. Schumacher

"We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature and have made us; for, assuredly, we have not come about by accident and certainly have not made ourselves"
~ E.F. Schumacher

* "Until mankind can extend the circle of his compassion to include all living things, he will never, himself, know peace."
~ Albert Schweitzer

"Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth."
~ Albert Schweitzer

"The conservationist's most Important task, if we are to save the earth, is to educate."
~ Peter Scott, founder chairman of the World Wildlife Federation

* All things are connected like the blood that unites us, We did not weave the web of life. We are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
~ Chief Seattle

"Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the people of the earth."
~ Chief Seattle

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
~ Chief Seattle, 1855

 

* I feel that our planet is in peril and that creating a sustainable planet for my children and my children’s children is the most important thing I can do in this lifetime.
-- Kyra Sedgwick

Ever since I had my first child I have been passionate in my commitment to preserve our precious resources for my children and their children’s children. This is the obligation of all of us visiting this planet for a limited time.
-- Kyra Sedgwick

* Just as with other great words, the word environment means different things. You might say that a cave woman twenty thousand years ago sweeping out the cave was improving the environment. Many people improving the environment think only in terms of the air they breathe in their hometown and the water in the aquifer under their hometown. My guess is very few are thinking centuries ahead or thousand of years ahead, but that’s what we have to do.
~ Pete Seeger

So bleak is the picture... that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century.
~ Philip Shabecoff

 

Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.
-- George Bernard Shaw

* "The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative."
~ Vandana Shiva

"America's last wild places are everyone's good dream--our national commons--the enclaves we set aside for solice and renewal."
~ Annick Smith

"Our moral and ethical responsibility is to protect other species in the spirit of husbandry rather than destroy them in and attitude of conquest."
~ Charles Southwick
* "The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute."
-- Gloria Steinem

"Wildness can be a way of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."
~ Wallace Stenger

The Truly Healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating."
~ William H. Stewart

 

 

* The Earth Charter is important as an expression of the commitment of people throughout the Earth to evoke their own deepest moral, spiritual and ethical principles in the task of ensuring a sustainable future for those who inhabit the Earth now and those who will follow us on the Earth.
-- Maurice Strong

Nothing less than the fate of the planet is at stake... No place on the planet can remain an island of affluence in a sea of misery.
-- Maurice Strong

We're either going to save the world or no one will be saved.
-- Maurice Strong

 

 

Ecology Quotes

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World Water Day - March 22

Earth Day - April 22

 

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