c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Long dismissed as children's stories or 'myths' by Westerners, Australian Aboriginal stories have only recently begun to be taken seriously for what they are: the longest continuous record of historic events and spirituality in the world.
— Karl-Erik Sveiby, Treading Lightly: The Hidden Wisdom of the World's Oldest People
Compared to forest or aquatic ecosystems, grassland is unstable. It requires rather precise geological and climatic conditions, and if these conditions are not maintained--if too much rain falls, or too little--it quickly turns into forest or desert, both of which are dominated by woody plants. This instability is reflected in the spectacular but brief careers of various grassland faunas. Humanity, with its dazzling symbioses, preadaptations, and neoteny, is the most spectacular of these--and may well be the briefest.
— David Rains Wallace, The Klamath Knot: Explorations of Myth and Evolution
The Everglades was the only place on earth where alligators (broad snout, fresh water, darker skin) and crocodiles (pointy snout, salt water, toothy grin) lived side by side. It was the only home of the Everglades mink, Okeechobee gourd, and Big Cypress fox squirrel. It had carnivorous plants, amphibious birds, oysters that grew on trees, cacti that grew in water, lizards that changed colors, and fish that changed genders. It had 1,100 species of trees and plants, 350 birds, and 52 varieties of porcelain-smooth, candy-striped tree snails. It had bottlenose dolphins, marsh rabbits, ghost orchids, moray eels, bald eagles, and countless other species that didn't seem to belong on the same continent, much less in the same ecosystem.
— Michael Grunwald, The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
The river of his youth had been diverted and poured out broadly across the land to seep through dirt to the roots of crops instead of running in its bed. The river was no longer a river, and the desert was no longer a desert. Nothing was as it had been. He knew what had happened to the sagelands. He himself had helped burn them. Then men like his father had seized the river without a trace of evil in their hearts, sure of themselves but ignorant, and children of their time entirely, with no other bearings to rely on. Irrigators and fruit-tree growers, they believed the river to be theirs. His own life spanned that time and this, and so he believed in the old fast river as much as he believed in apple orchards, and yet he saw that the two were at odds, the river defeated that apples might grow as far as Royal Slope. It made no more sense to love the river and at the same time kill it growing apples than it made sense to love small birds on the wing and shoot them over pointing dogs. But he'd come into the world in another time, a time immune to these contradictions and in the end he couldn't shake old ways any more than he could shake his name.
— David Guterson, East of the Mountains
Though this new forest grew mightily, elsewhere the mighty jungles fell. Elsewhere the coastal rain forests that furred the body of the world were torn and riven. Elsewhere the last of the old growth the last of the world’s own garment were ripped away. It was in this time, now, that the mother of us all was stripped naked and left to die in shame of her children, she who had been robed in glory like this, adorned like this. I bent my head upon the roots and wept, sorrowing for the trees.
— Sheri S. Tepper, The Family Tree
Pages could be written on the immense losses of productive soil that occur annually in almost every continent of the earth; on lethal air pollution episodes in major urban areas; on the worldwide distribution of toxic agents, such as radioactive isotopes and lead; on the chemicalization of man's immediate environment-- one might say his very dinner table—with pesticide residues and food additives. Pieced together like bits of a jigsaw puzzle, these affronts to the environment form a pattern of destruction that has no precedent in man's long history on earth.
— Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism
In this century wars will not be fought over oil, as in the past, but over water. The situation is becoming desperate. The world's water is strained by population growth. There is no more fresh water on earth than two thousand years ago when the population was three percent of its current size. Even without the inevitable droughts, like the current one, it will get worse as demand and pollution increase. Some countries will simply run out of water, sparking a global refugee crisis. Tens of millions of people will flood across international borders. It means the collapse of fisheries, environmental destruction, conflict, lower living standards." She paused for a moment. "As people who deal with the ocean you must see the irony. We are facing a shortage on a planet whose surface is covered two-thirds with water.
— Clive Cussler, Blue Gold
Destroying the joint means building a new system in which it is not OK to allow people to be marginalised, exploited and discriminated against, it's not OK to ignore the needs of future generations, it's not OK to wreck this extraordinary, beautiful, fragile planetary environment that sustains us - our Mother Earth.
— Christine Milne, Destroying the Joint: Why Women Have to Change the World
Where there is a smoke, there is an ecologist.
— Ljupka Cvetanova, The New Land
Selling cakes and pies to raise money for research into cancer or any other health related issue, is like selling meat at a campaign to raise awareness about the environment.
— Mango Wodzak, The Eden Fruitarian Guidebook
The refusal to change by clinging onto superficial material wealth at any cost today, is a certain sentence of death tomorrow for all future priceless life entities we have come to love and know.
— Alastair Agutter
Clean communities, crystal clear coastal waters
— Lailah Gifty Akita
Find the environment that best suits what lifestyle is required.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is A Cocktail
Even in the pages of the New York Times and The New Yorker, it seems the epithet 'virtuous,' when applied to an act of personal environmental responsibility, may be used only ironically. Tell me: How did it come to pass that virtue - a quality that for most of history has generally been deemed, well, a virtue - become a mark of liberal softheadedness? How peculiar, that doing the right thing by the environment - buying the hybrid, eating like a locavore - should now set you up for the Ed Begley Jr. treatment.
— Michael Pollan
There are always ways to control your environment.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is A Cocktail
We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.
— Adlai Stevenson, Speeches of Adlai Stevenson: With a Foreword
You're either for the environment or against the environment.
— Mommy Moo Moo
The name Matthew means gift of Yahweh. Saint Matthew was one of the twelve apostles and he was a tax collector. Hurricane Matthew just delivered us a gift from God and collected taxes for our abysmal management of Mother Earth.
— Mommy Moo Moo
Mother Nature is challenging enough, let's keep oil drilling out of the picture.
— Mommy Moo Moo
When the productive lands lose their essence, our productive lives shall least have essence!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Lightworkers and holistic leaders who are afraid to voice their opinions on global events, this I say to you: Whether it is for the environment or human rights, it is time for lightworkers to get off the bench. There is too much at risk to worry about risking a sale. This is why we are here.
— Eileen Anglin
At this point, I want to say point-blank what I hope is already clear: though agrarianism proposes that everybody has agrarian responsibilities, it does not propose that everybody should be a farmer or that we do not need cities. Nor does it propose that every product be a necessity. Furthermore, any thinkable human economy would have to grant to manufacturing an appropriate and honorable place. Agrarians would insist only that any manufacturing enterprise should be formed and scaled to fit the local landscape, the local ecosystem, and the local community, and that it should be locally owned and employ local people. They would insist, in other words, that the shop or factory owner should not be an outsider, but rather a sharer in the fate of the place and the community. The deciders should live with the results of their decisions.
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
Create an environment to grow consistently and to influence everyone around you positively. Your future doesn’t have to equal your past. You are designed to achieve greatness, to be happy and to live the life you deserve. Start with setting a P.O.S.I.T.I.V.E. Goal.™
— Farshad Asl, The "No Excuses" Mindset: A Life of Purpose, Passion, and Clarity
Look at all that rubbish," she said, watching the electric van slowly whirr from bin to bin, little men in gloves removing it all."They're taking it away," I said. "Where to?" she said. "It just gets moved around dearie, that's all.
— Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places: Stories
The boundary between tame and wild exists only in the imperfections of the human mind.
— Aldo Leopold
Trust the horticulturalist: California's genius may be green, but it's underlying beauty is brown.
— Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History
There are some things in the world we can't change - gravity, entropy, the speed of light, and our biological nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and well being. Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism, free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere.
— David Suzuki
Surround yourself with everything and everyone that will help you feel your best, think your best, do your best, and be your best.
— Farshad Asl
Your environment plays a key factor in living a fulfilled life. In order to bear fruit, gain fulfillment, and meet fruition, you must intentionally create an environment that will sustain you.
— Farshad Asl
Be prepared to change yourself if you think there is a need to change your environment.
— Eraldo Banovac
...environment scarcely recognises a political frontier.
— T.C. Smout, Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England
...no other life form needed man, man needed all the others in which to survive.
— Barry Babcock, TEACHERS IN THE FOREST: Essays from the last wilderness in Mississippi Headwaters Country
I simply feel that now we've so utterly perfected the walkie-talkie to the point where it has become the iPhone, maybe we could turn the great minds that brought us the Nintendo Wii, to, say, getting fresh water to the one billion people on our planet who don't have it.
— Colin Beavan, No Impact Man
The stranger smiled at her. "Humanity has found a cure to a disease they never new existed.
— Jeyn Roberts, Dark Inside
The senior British economic thinker on climate, Sir Nicholas Stern, has estimated that if we don't reverse climate change, the costs of dealing with the resulting catastrophe would be as much as twenty percent of the world's Gross Domestic Product. He's saying that if we do nothing about climate change, then we will have to spend a full fifth of our planet's economic energy on dealing with the floods, hurricanes, droughts, food shortages, and epidemics that will result.
— Colin Beavan, No Impact Man
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food packaging makes up twenty percent of our solid waste nationwide.
— Colin Beavan, No Impact Man
Early accounts of the abundance of fish and wildlife offer us a window to the past that helps reveal the magnitude of subsequent declines. They provide us with benchmarks against which we can compare the condition of today's seas. Such benchmarks are valuable in countering the phenomenon of shifting environmental baselines, whereby each generation comes to view the environment into which it was born as natural, or normal. Shifting environmental baselines cause a collective societal amnesia in which gradual deterioration of the environment and depletion of wildlife populations pass almost unnoticed. Our expectations diminish with time, and with them goes our will to do something about the losses.
— Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea
When discharging industrial gas into the indoor environment in high altitude astronomy, we never wore breathing respirators that fed us oxygenated air at above the legally required 19.5% oxygen levels.
— Steven Magee
When I worked in astronomy, I routinely observed young college and university students working with liquid nitrogen and breathing nitrogen gas as they discharged it into the indoor environment at high altitude.
— Steven Magee
Astronomy staff that routinely discharged industrial gas into the indoor environment at high altitudes did not wear oxygen deficiency monitors or protective breathing respirators.
— Steven Magee
Two hundred years after Euro-Americans "discovered" it, America's river west begins and ends at pollution.
— Bill Lambrecht, Big Muddy Blues: True Tales and Twisted Politics Along Lewis and Clark's Missouri River
It's going to take all of us, gathering our voices and acting together. Saying,"Not on our watch" to create a future for humans, animals and the environment.
— Eileen Anglin
Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it.
— Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
For most people the environment controls them rather than being in full control of experiences.
— Steven Redhead, Life Is Simply A Game
Save this gift given to us.
— Eileen Anglin
Is it really over?" Kurlansky lamented over the dry-docked Massachusetts cod fishermen at the conclusion of his moving, epic book. "Are these the last gatherers of food from the wild to be phased out? Is this the last of wild food? Is our last physical tie to untamed nature to become an obscure delicacy like the occasional pheasant?"These words stayed with me over the years to come. But histories of environmental wrong doing have a strange way of putting traumatic events in the past, sealing off bad human behavior of former times from the unwritten pages of the present and the future.
— Paul Greenberg
If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.
— James Lovelock
I don’t know why we keep building these fucking dams,” Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. “Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they’ve all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They’re going to build another eighty of them. It’s just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something. . . . There’s just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out.
— Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
— Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal
The world doesn't need more people to save the world, what it really needs is more people to kick asses of those who pollute.
— EverSkeptic
What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps 'baffling' would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, and I can't help but wonder why. I'm convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It's the only explanation that makes sense.
— Douglas Adams
Those least responsible for climate change are worst affected by it.
— Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis
We can and must respond creatively to the triple crisis and simultaneously overcome dehumanization, economic inequality, and, ecological catastrophe.
— Vandana Shiva
Surround yourself with people who move you, motivate you and mobilize you.
— Tony Curl
There are no wastelands in our landscape quite like those we've created ourselves.
— Tim Winton
A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening -- as the five of us did -- it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold. [1971]
— John McPhee, Encounters with the Archdruid
This is one of the greatest challenges of our time: to convert ourselves to a type of development that knows how to respect creation.
— Pope Francis
The scandal with the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea is how it managed to obtain a construction permit to build a manned telescope in a known biologically toxic environment to workers. How many more people need to die, get injured or develop long term very high altitude sickness that will last a lifetime?
— Steven Magee, Curing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity
When we are in a wrong environment, we feel so paranoid, yet unwilling to move out. There's no need for pussyfooting, we got to release our poisonous fluid and scream aloud, storming  out of the show like a radical.
— Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign
The fish, whose tail was nipped, separated itself from the group and began to appear sickly, most likely from stress, Coal reasoned. He refused to be this fish, or the belly up fish, or the blue fish gasping for air. Rather, he resolved to be the other fish, the one who found purpose and meaning despite the unnatural environment, despite depending upon keepers for survival.
— Jesikah Sundin, Elements
I remember standing in the bush above this unbelievably wild river, and thinking this is as good as it gets. Exquisite birdsong, jagged peaks of the Alps beckoning like the spires of mystical cathedrals, the smell of moisture in the beech forest like an elixir. Nature in its raw, unpredictable state – at an entirely different end of the spectrum from the confines of a test tube or comfort of a biotech lab.
— Geoffrey Robert
People who have metal implants should be familiar with the symptoms of radio wave sickness and should keep their environment free of wireless radiation producing products.
— Steven Magee, Solar Radiation, Global Warming and Human Disease
Carson was persuaded that many experts either failed to recognize or chose to ignore the potential hazards of pesticides. She was convinced that the weight of her scientific evidence would defeat the skeptics among them. And once the public had the necessary information, citizens could make informed decisions about what Carson believed was a matter of life and death.
— Mark H. Lytle, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement
She could not be silent even if the men of science, many of them smug experts in white lab coats who promised “better living through chemistry,” dismissed her warnings as feminine hysteria.
— Mark H. Lytle, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement
We still talk in terms of conquest,” she observed. “We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.” Without hesitating, she delivered her final blow: “I think we’re challenged as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.
— Mark H. Lytle, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, and the Rise of the Environmental Movement
Sky is grey, vegetation is plastic, and mankind is pale, for we have spent our days conceiving unnecessary tools for our arousal, and so we hide the nakedness of nature with brutal machinnes.
— Shawn Lukas
Most police cars are the equivalent of an electrical room on wheels and it does not surprise me that police officers that spend time in such a biologically toxic environment are displaying aggression.
— Steven Magee
There's only three things you need to do when you are finished editing your book - Sleep! Sleep! and Sleep!
— A. Louise Robertson, Chained to Mineola
As the stewards of creation, what account will the Human Race be able to give of our Stewardship?
— D. Denise Dianaty
Caring nature is the best commitments you can do for your feature!!!
— Karthikeyan V
Everywhere my feet have touched on this planet has been magic, why cant others see it this way?
— Mary-Ellen Peters
We have, as a nation, made choices that by all reasonable expectations should have put us in harm's way. There is little doubt that we continue to make choices that are likely to make the danger even greater. And yet, by dint of an accident of geography and economics, we have so far been spared the worst consequences of our actions. And even as those consequences begin to take hold in other places, here, in the parts of America where most of us live, at least for the moment, we can hear the winds roaring over our heads like that coal train, but somehow the worst of the danger still seems removed. What is our responsibility? (164)
— Seamus McGraw, Betting the Farm on a Drought: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change
Deciding we won't drive to that chain grocery store and buy that imported pineapple is a path to liberation. Deciding to walk to the farmers' market and buy fresh, local peas is like spitting in the eye of the industries that control us. Every act of refusal is also an act of assent. Every time we way no to consumer culture, we say yes to something more beautiful and sustaining. Life is not something we go through or that happens to us; it's something we create by our own decisions.
— Kathleen Dean Moore, If Your House Is On Fire
We are the last generation with a real opportunity to save the world.
— Laurence Overmire, The One Idea That Saves The World: A Call to Conscience and A Call to Action
Environment' is a term that creates no pictures in the mind, which is why I have begun to use 'natural world' or 'living planet' instead.
— George Monbiot
Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.
— Elizabeth Kolbert
There were no laptops or handheld devices in class. Ilgauskas didn't exclude them; we did, sort of, unspokenly. Some of us could barely complete a thought without touch pads or scroll buttons, but we understood that high-speed data systems did not belong here. They were an assault on the environment, which was defined by length, width, and depth, with time drawn out, computed in heartbeats.
— Don DeLillo
Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organised political resistance
— Derrick Jensen
Geothermal energy should be a priority in a ever increasing warmer planet. It is kind of like cooking a chicken from the outside. Eventually, the underlying parts get well done.
— Phil Mitchell
You’re talking about gold and silver, cash and securities. I’m talking about the sheer beauty of the land, the value of unpolluted parkland made wild and staying wild forever.
— Jasper Fforde
...where the preservation of a natural resource like the redwoods is concerned, that there is a common sense limit. I mean, if you've looked at a hundred thousand acres or so of trees — you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?
— Ronald Reagan
Modern Humans have at least dealt out death fairly: We began our existence by killing each other.
— Mark Lynas, The God Species
For a brief review of our history to date shows us in a very singular role:that of serial killers.
— Mark Lynas, The God Species
We are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effects and to ignore all else. Unless this appears promptly and in such obvious form that it cannot be ignored, we deny the existence of hazard. Even research men suffer from the handicap of inadequate methods of detecting the beginnings of injury. The lack of sufficiently delicate methods to detect injury before symptoms appear is one of the great unsolved problems in medicine.
— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
For you, it’s all about money, money, money. But what about the forests I say? Some of those trees have been there for hundreds of years. What right have you to destroy that?
— Emily Arden, Lie to me: Deception: Book Two
Do you know how many acres of beautiful forests and moors have been destroyed by your company? How many animals have lost their homes and how many trees have been murdered? I am sick of being bothered by you people.
— Emily Arden, Lie to me: Deception: Book Two
Unfortunately for the existing mature systems in nature, the rapid expansion of the human bubble is destroying them. Unfortunately for us, we can't exist without them any more than a living person can exist without oxygen or a body can exist without a head. In this sense, it is actually a conceptual error to define the environment as the rest of the biosphere save humans, and think of ourselves as apart from it, since we can't exist without it.
— Jacob Lund Fisker, Early Retirement Extreme: A Philosphical and Practical Guide to Financial Independence
Observe the behavior of your environment carefully for clues as to what is acceptable and rewarded.
— Bonnie Marcus, The Politics of Promotion: How High-Achieving Women Get Ahead and Stay Ahead
Our kids need us to be the dad, not a fun single uncle. When you can replace your 007 poster with a framed portrait of Grandma, your kids will experience an underlying sense of being at home when they are with you—whether for a weekend, a summer, or full-time.
— Tez Brooks
Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.
— R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be A Verb
God loves cleanliness.The environment must be kept clean.
— Lailah Gifty Akita, The Alphabets of  Success: Passion Driven Life
If you really think that the enviroment is less important than the economy, try holding your breath while you count your money.
— Dr. Guy McPherson
If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations.
— Edward O. Wilson
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are — until the poem — nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.
— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
The ancient trees are the deep earth's language for speaking to the universe. The earth communicates through trees to the animals and to the birds living above - and to the very heavens. The trees draw the earth's water up from the ground. Then breathing, they return it to the air for the clouds and the blessed rain that falls to begin the cycle anew. She thinks of the thin layer of living things as a fragile space between earth's molten rock core and the frozen outer universe of stars. The thin layer is like her own life here - precious, finite
— J.J. Brown, Brindle 24
We know a lot nowadays about how to extrapolate from rats to people, but we don't only have to rely on that. In a sense we've made ourselves into experimental animals. There are too many of us, too crowded, in an environment we've poisoned with our own-uh-byproducts. Now when this happens to a wild species, or to rats in a lab, the next generation turns out weaker and slower and more timid. This is a defense mechanism.
— John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up
The killers are the people who are ruining the world to line their pockets, poisoning us, burying us under garbage!
— John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up
Right! Right! 'Stead of which, over here, they shit in the water until it's dangerous to drink, then make a fucking fortune out of selling us gadgets to purify it again. Why can't they be made to strain out their own shit?
— John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up
The ancient trees are the deep earth's language for speaking to the universe. The earth communicates through trees to the animals and to the birds living above - and to the very heavens. The trees draw the earth's water up from the ground. Then breathing, they return it to the air for the clouds and the blessed rain that falls to begin the cycle anew. She thinks of the thin layer of living things as a fragile space between earth's molten rock core and the frozen outer universe of stars. The thin layer is like her own life here - precious, finite.
— J.J. Brown, Brindle 24
In fact, Wen'an was the prefect location for the scrap-plastics trace: it was close, but not too close, to Beijing and Tianjin, two massive metropolises with lots of consumers and lots of factories in need of cheap raw materials. Even better, its traditional industry - farming - was disappearing as the region's once-plentiful streams and wells were run dry by the region's rampant, unregulated oil industry. So land was plentiful, and so were laborers desperate for a wage to replace the money lost when their fields died. As I hear these stories, I can't help but wonder: How much of the plastic that Wen'an recycles was made from the oil pumped from Wen'an's soil? Are all those old plastic bags blowing down Wen'an's streets ghosts of the fuel that used to run beneath them?
— Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade
Create and maintain a beautiful environment and surroundings in which to live.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Humans Do Artificial thingsBut nature always hits Backs Naturally !!!
— AkshayShinde
I don't fear fracking. I fear carbon
— Russell Gold, The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.
— Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion; And Other Essays
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
— Rachel Carson
Is it wrong of me to propose a ceasefire agreement between humans and whales and dolphins, I know it is in actuality a one sided massacre, but so was Bosnia and there the ceasefire is holding, so would it be nice to have a declaration backing a ceasefire between us mammals?
— Steve Merrick
The idea of unlimited growth... needs to be seriously questioned on at least two counts: the availability of basic resources and... the capacity of the environment to cope with the degree of interference implied. - E.F. Schumacher
— Wayne Ellwood, The No-Nonsense Guide to Degrowth and Sustainability
In recent years, academics, policy-makers, and experts have raised the question of the applicability of peacetime environmental law in times of armed conflict.
— Widad Akreyi
Take the time to get it right. There'll be gas tomorrow night
— Russell Gold, The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
Across the world, the lack of accountability for the harm to the environment and public health caused by conflict and military activities undermines global efforts to help fragile countries recover from armed conflicts
— Widad Akreyi
Toxic remnants of war represent a profound challenge for the protection of public health and the restoration of the environment in countries affected by conflict.
— Widad Akreyi
In spring, 1937, of course, families still rode the rails because of the Depression, which everyone said was already in the history books as the worst ever. The jobs still couldn’t be found, at least for most people. Everett itself—the smaller, poorer, little brother lying north of Seattle—ached with the unemployed and the hopeless. The labor union tensions in the woods still festered and got bloody at times. But Skybillings—and the railroad logging shows of the Cascade Mountains—felt like they were, inch-by-inch, rebuilding America.
— Ronald Geigle, The Woods
Seems like people always want to think they're doomed. It brings them some kind of black comfort, I guess.Nate
— C.J. Box
Fracking is different. The risks of any single well are tiny compared to a nuclear power plant. But several hundred wells? Several thousand?
— Russell Gold, The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
Fracking ensures that the age of oil-and it's princely hydrocarbon cousin, the natural gas molecule-will not end because we have run out of fossil fuels. But it may end because burning these wonderful fuels puts the planet farther down a path we don't want to head down
— Russell Gold
We are fossil fuel addicts. What happens when drug addicts detox? They can be rash, cranky, even psychotic and dangerous. It would be good for the environment if the entire economy abruptly quit fossil fuels, but that's not realistic. I wouldn't want to be around if it ever happened. Perhaps it's best to think of natural gas like methadone. It's a way for an energy addicted society to get off dirtier fuels and smooth out the detox bumps.
— Russell Gold, The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World
The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
— Margaret Atwood, MaddAddam
Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.
— Derrick Jensen, Deep Green Resistance
The necessity of political struggle especially means confronting and contradicting those on the left who say that resistance is futile. Such people have no place in a movement for justice. For actionists who choose to work aboveground, this confrontation with detractors - and some of these detractors reject the idea of resistance of any kind - is one of the small, constant actions you can take. Defend the possibility of resistance, insist on a moral imperative of fighting for this planet, and argue for direct action against perpetrators. Despite what much of the left has now embraced, we are not all equally responsible. There are a few corporations that have turned the planet into a dead commodity for their private wealth, destroying human cultures along with it.
— Lierre Keith
We forget that we humans are animals, inextricably connected to the world and everything in it. In the rush to bring GMO food to the world because it was good for us, nobody had asked the question whether it would be good for the world.
— Kenneth Eade, An Involuntary Spy
This exciting new field of epigenetics--meaning literally "around" the gene--allows us to see how environmental factors alter our gene expression in a specific place within each cell. As a result, we now know that when we take active control of these factors, we can literally help control our health and genetic destiny.
— Woodson Merrell, The Detox Prescription: Supercharge Your Health, Strip Away Pounds, and Eliminate the Toxins Within
We have used so much polyethylene ( plastic ) since the invention of this oil derivative that plastic broken down has over time completely changed the molecular structure of seawater .
— Norbert F Hoffmann Jr
the assumptions that "pollution is the price of progress" or that "we must choose between jobs and the environment" have long limited our creative thinking about innovative solutions that can be good for the environment, the workers, and a healthy economy.
— Annie Leonard, The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and our Health—and a Vision for Change
Nature is inexhaustibly sustainable if we care for it. It is our universal responsibility to pass a healthy earth onto future generations.
— Sylvia Dolson, Joy of Bears
New Rule: Oil companies must stop with the advertisements implying they're friends of the environment. "At Exxon Mobil, we care about a thriving wildlife." Please--the only thing an oil executive has in common with a seagull is they'd both steal french fries from a baby.
— Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity’s captive.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.
— Russell Banks, Continental Drift
Radiate peace. Who knows? The peace you spread may create the only restful place in your environment.
— Stella Payton
The cabin will return to the soil when abandoned by its owner, yet in its simplicity it offers perfect protection against the seasonal cold without disfiguring the sheltering forest. With the yurt and the igloo, it figures among the handsomest human responses to environmental adversity.
— Sylvain Tesson, Dans les forêts de Sibérie
Concrete breathes sun's heat.
— Cameron Conaway, Bonemeal
We loved our homeland for thousands of years which cost us climate change and environmental degradation because we were too selfish to care about the nature, now it is time that we must love our world at least for a little time.
— M.F. Moonzajer
New Rule: You can't put a windmill in your campaign ad if you voted against every single bill that might lead to someone building one. As long as you're sending a camera crew to a farm, why not just take a picture of actual bullshit?
— Bill Maher, The New New Rules: A Funny Look At How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass
One day is not enough to watch a tree, one life is not enough to love a tree.I wonder when i see a new leaf, it was like a new born baby come and meet the world; I feel great to see a plant bearing fruits, it was like a mother carrying her child during her pregnancy period
— Karthikeyan V
Dew moves mountains.
— Cameron Conaway, Bonemeal
...the Northern Rockies region is a rapidly changing part of the United States. Ironically, in many areas today's number-one threat is not clear-cutting, overgrazing, or destructive mining practices. It is something more insidious. Well-meaning people, many of them former visitors who were seduced into moving to the glorious region, are loving it to death.
— Michael McCoy, Journey to the Northern Rockies
Consider the impact of your personal care choices on our health, water supply and our wider environment.
— Joanna Runciman, The Radiant Woman's Handbook
The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.
— David Attenborough
These folk are hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore we are their unfriends, and if they will not depart we shall afflict them in all ways that we can.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.
— David Brin, Earth
You maybe able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere.
— Donella H. Meadows
Wilderness is a resource which can shrink but not grow... creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.
— Aldo Leopold
I turn and walk back to the home shore whose tall yellow bluffs still bare of snow I can see nearly half a mile to the north. I find my way as I came, over dusty sandbars and by old channels, through shrubby stands of willows. The cold, late afternoon sun breaks through its cloud cover and streaks the grey sand mixed with snow.As it has fallen steadily in the past weeks, the river has left behind many shallow pools, and these are now roofed with ice. When I am close to the main shore I come upon one of them, not far from the wooded bank. The light snow that fell a few days ago has blown away; the ice is polished and is thick enough to stand on. I can see to the bottom without difficulty, as through heavy dark glass.I bend over, looking at the debris caught there in the clear, black depth of the ice: I see a few small sticks, and many leaves. There are alder leaves, roughly toothed and still half green; the more delicate birch leaves and aspen leaves, the big, smooth poplar leaves, and narrow leaves from the willows. They are massed or scattered, as they fell quietly or as the wind blew them into the freezing water. Some of them are still fresh in color, glowing yellow and orange; others are mottled with grey and brown. A few older leaves lie sunken and black on the silty bottom. Here and there a pebble of quartz is gleaming. But nothing moves there. It is a still, cold world, something like night, with its own fixed planets and stars.
— John Meade Haines, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness
Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction fol
— Rachel Carson
You are not stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic.
— TomTom SATNAV Advertisement
We urgently need to do - and I mean actually do - something radical to avert a global catastrophe. But I don't think we will.I think we're fucked.
— Stephen Emmott, Ten Billion
Ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure...it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an "acceptable" rate.
— William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
Charles Lathrop Pack, president of the American Tree Association, told how Rogers gave him advice in handling an educational campaign in tree planting.'Will Rogers told me,' said Pack, 'that I was on the wrong track in trying to educate people to the value of putting idle land to work growing trees. "Pack," he said, "you go down to Washington and get Congress to pass a law prohibiting tree planting and you'll have everybody doing it in a week.
— P.J. O'Brien, Will Rogers: Ambassador Of Good Will, Prince Of Wit And Wisdom
We must have clean air and water, and beautiful natural foods for everyone, everywhere.
— Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason
We had been taken from The Wild and brought together in one place, because, for some strange reason, people found us interesting.
— Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
If we keep pulling death from the ground, we will reap death from the skies.
— Van Jones, The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems
A climate's changes are tough to quantify. Butterflies can help. Entomologists prefer "junk species--" the kind of butterflies too common for most collections-- to keep up with what's going on in the insect's world. They're easy to find and observe. When do something unusual, something's changed in the area.Art Shapiro's team at UC Davis monitors ten local study sites, some since the 1970s. The ubiquitous species are the study's go-tos, helping distinguish between lasting changes (climate warming, habitat loss) and ones that will right themselves (one cold winter, droughts like last year's). Consistency is key; they collect details year after year, no empty data sets between.A few species have disappeared from parts of the study area altogether, probably a lasting change. On the other hand, seemingly big news in 2012 might be just a year's aberration. Two butterflies came back to the city of Davis last year, the umber skipper after 30 years, the woodland skipper after 20-- both likely a result of a dry winter with near-perfect breeding conditions of sunny afternoons and cool nights.
— Johnson Rizzo National Geographic Feb. 2013
If the world is polluted, we are polluted. If the world dies, we die anyway. I don't pretend to be separate from the world. If she is poisoned, I jump in and be poisoned with her.
— J. Gabriel Gates, Blood Zero Sky
Extinction, the irrevocable loss of a species, causes pain that can never find relief. It is an ache that will pass from generation to generation for the rest of human history.
— Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea
I believe that people were not so allergic to their environment until they began polluting themselves and their world with so many drugs and toxins.
— Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain
Shroud of dust now covers the beautiful earth, wonder when we respire in the fresh air of verdure.
— Soumya V.
The principle of fair reduction is based on the concept of historic responsibility. Developed countries finished industrialising first. Thus, over the last 60 years, the developed countries, which represent 17 percent of the world's population, have been responsible for 70 percent of carbon emissions. The developed countries should adjust for this disparity accordingly. In contrast, developing countries, which represent 83 percent of the world's population, have contributed only 30 percent of total carbon emissions over the past 60 years. It is therefore fair to give developing countries more leeway to produce carbon emissions.
— Yan Xuetong
Living on through loss seems by contrast as bad or worse; it means experiencing environmental deterioration, steady decline in human well-being, and increasing constraint on future human action consciously and slowly while realizing that they are likely to continue for generations after one is gone.
— Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century
If we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.
— David Suzuki
There's one thing you can say for air pollution, you get utterly amazing sunrises.
— Terry Pratchett