Environmental quotes about

Environmental Quotes about
ACTIVISM AND TAKING ACTION
"For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the
root."
— Henry David Thoreau
"Let every individual and institution now think and act as a responsible trustee
of Earth, seeking choices in ecology, economics and ethics that will provide a
sustainable future, eliminate pollution, poverty and violence, awaken the
wonder of life and foster peaceful progress in the human adventure."
— John McConnell, founder of International Earth Day
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."
— Edmund Burke
"It's a job that's never started that takes the longest to finish."
— J.R.R. Tolkien
"We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles."
— Jimmy Carter
"For what is the hope of the hypocrite, though he hath gained, when God
taketh away his soul?"
— Job 27:8
"The superior man seeks what is right; the inferior one, what is profitable."
— Confucius
"To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, that
is to have succeeded."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Peasant people ... don't have a chance to share in the riches that the planet
can offer because some people are taking off so much of the pleasures of this
world, and there's only so much to go around."
— Sister Dorothy Stang, an eco-activist nun from Dayton, Ohio, who in
2005 was murdered in the Brazilian Amazon
"The ultimate test of man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice
something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be
heard."
— Gaylord Nelson
former governor of Wisconsin, co-founder of Earth Day
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something

else is the greatest accomplishment."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good action; try to use
ordinary situations."
— Jean Paul Richter, German Romantic novelist and humorist
"Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the
want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if
we are always doing."
— Thomas Jefferson
"Your descendants shall gather your fruits."
— Virgil
"A person writing at night may put out the lamp, but the words he has written
will remain. It is the same with the destiny we create for ourselves in this
world."
— Shakyamuni
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AGRICULTURE AND FARMING
""Ol' MacDonald had a farm—until America's corporate animal factories
plowed it under...""
— Deirdre Imus
"Industrialized, chemical-intensive agriculture and our globalized system of
distributing food and fiber are literally destroying the earth, driving two billion
farmers off the land, and producing a product which is increasingly
contaminated. That's why the wave of the future is organic and sustainable,

not GMO."
— Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association
"I believe that the great Creator has put ores and oil on this earth to give us a
breathing spell. As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our
farms, which is God's true storehouse and can never be exhausted. We can
learn to synthesize material for every human need from things that grow."
— George Washington Carver
"Farmers are the only indispensable people on the face of the earth."
— Li Zhaoxing, Ambassador, China
"The diligent farmer plants trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit."
— Cicero
"Cows were made to eat grass.... The two biggest things that harm a cow are
grain and concrete. By kicking the cows outside and letting them be on the
sod and letting them eat the grass, you can get rid of about 90% of your cow
problems."
— Kevin Sullivan, dairy farmer
"The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural
policies and subsidies."
— Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma
"Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply a broad-spectrum insecticide
to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect ... without also
killing the 'good' insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking
down organic matter [and maintaining healthy soil]?
— Rachel Carson, author, Silent Spring
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AIR POLLUTION / AIR QUALITY
"The American people have a right to air that they and their children can
breathe without fear."
— Lyndon Baines Johnson
"In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other
cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted
that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day."
— Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.: Mobilizing to Save Civilization
"Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you
may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you."
— John Muir
"All of us face a variety of risks to our health as we go about our day-to-day
lives.... Indoor air pollution is one risk that you can do something about."
— US EPA
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ANIMAL WELFARE
"We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how
they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words."
— Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty
"Animals raised on factory farms are routinely mutilated, including removing
beaks from poultry, and clipping pigs' tails and teeth, because the animals
become very aggressive from the stress of close confinement and they attack

each other. Cows' tails are also removed to make milking easier. These
practices have been shown to cause lasting pain."
— Sustainable Table
"An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics and related drugs produced in this
country are used for nontherapeutic purposes such as accelerating animal
growth and compensating for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on
'factory farms.' This translates to ... almost eight times the amount given to
humans to treat disease."
— Union of Concerned Scientists
"I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was 'Feed my sheep,'
not 'Try experiments on my rats,' or even 'Teach my performing dogs new
tricks.'"
— C.S. Lewis
"The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I
believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen."
— Alice Walker
"I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit."
— Shakespeare, (Sir Andrew Aguecheek, in Twelfth Night)
"We consider ourselves a nation of animal lovers, but by far the moment that
we are with animals the most is when they are on our plates and we are
about to eat them."
— William Rivas-Rivas, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
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BIODIVERSITY / SPECIES, PLANTS, ANIMALS
"We—human beings—are part of 'biodiversity.' We are dependent on the

whole food chain down below us."
— Darrell Merrell, heirloom vegetable farmer
"We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are
faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth's functioning in
its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide,
homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when
confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and
geocide, the devastation of the earth itself."
— Father Thomas Berry
"Each one [of the Earth's 5 million invertebrate species] plays a role in its
ecosystem. It's like we're tearing the cogs out of a great machine. The
machine might work after you tear out ten cogs, but what happens when you
tear out a hundred?"
— Scott Black, Xerces Society, quoted in Sierra
"A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to
destroy."
— John Sawhill, former president/CEO of The Nature Conservancy
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TenThreats to the Web of Lifeon Planet Earth
CHEMICALS AND TOXICS
"As crude a weapon as a cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been
hurled against the fabric of life."
— Rachel Carson
"We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we
be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals we disseminate widely in our
environment?"
"One in six Americans lives within a mile of a major toxic waste site."

— Phil Clapp, president, National Environmental Trust
"For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than
individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future... Yet
genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time..."
"Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious
manifestations, yet some of their worst enemies creep on them
unobtrusively."
— Dr. René Dubos, as quoted by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring
"There are thousands of different chemicals in the environment that may
cause adverse human health effects. Little is known about the toxicological
properties of most of these chemicals..."
— US EPA, "Unfinished Business: A Comparative Assessment of
Environmental Problems" [1987]
"Despite progress, lead poisoning remains one of the top childhood
environmental health problems today. Without further action, over the coming
decades large numbers of young children may be exposed to lead in amounts
that could impair their ability to learn and to reach their full potential."
— President's Task Force on Environmental Health Risks and Safety
Risks to Children [2000]
"Children between ages one and three are at the greatest risk [of lead
poisoning] because of normal hand-to-mouth activity and the increase in
mobility during their second and third years, which make lead hazards more
accessible to them."
— President's Task Force on Environmental Health Risks and Safety
Risks to Children [2000]
"The National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society focus most
of their resources on research and treatment rather than on cancer
prevention. By talking as if the cure is around the corner and their "war on
cancer" is being won, when certain cancer rates—notably breast cancer and
lung cancer among women and malignant melanoma—are on the rise, they
divert attention from strict regulation of industry and minimizing people's
exposure to carcinogens."
— H. Patricia Hynes, "The Recurring Silent Spring" [1989]
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CORPORATE GOVERNANCE, RESPONSIBILITY
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes
me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been
enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-
power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the
prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the
Republic is destroyed."
— Abraham Lincoln [1864]
Only when the last tree has been cut down,
Only when the last river has been poisoned,
Only when the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.
— Cree Indian Prophecy
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
— Richard Feynman, US educator and physicist
"Those who develop the technologies, who promote them and stand to profit
most from them, are not those who suffer their risks. The analysis of
technologies is biased toward their use because the technology promoters
generally lack the expertise and the incentive to analyze the risks of the
technologies for human health and the environment."
— H. Patricia Hynes, "The Recurring Silent Spring" [1989]
"[Because] corporations must have physically impossible 'endless growth' in
order to survive, corporate social responsibility is a myth. The only socially
responsible act that corporations can take is to dissolve."
— Adam D. Sacks
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ECONOMICS OF ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
"In the long term, economic sustainability depends on ecological
sustainability."
— “America’s Living Oceans” [Pew Oceans Report, 2003]
"If the physical scientists who warn about limits to growth are right,
confronting the global economic meltdown implies far more than merely
getting the banks and mortgage lenders back on their feet. Indeed, in that
case we face a fundamental change in our economy as significant as the
advent of the industrial revolution. We are at a historic inflection point—the
ending of decades of expansion and the beginning of an inevitable period of
contraction that will continue until humanity is once again living within the
limits of Earth's regenerative systems. But there are few signs that policy
makers understand any of this. Their thinking appears to be shaped primarily
by mainstream economists' assurances that growth can and must continue
into the indefinite future, and that the economic contraction the world is
currently experiencing is only temporary—a problem that can and must be
solved."
— Richard Heinberg
"Good house keeping practices in industries can reduce 30% of waste and
thereby 30% of the cost of waste management."
— SumithPilapitiya
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."
— Edward Abbey
"We're captives of a business model that has passed its useful limits. [But]
until there's a fundamental change in the underlying rules set, the model will
keep yielding the same output."
— George Ure, author of Urban Survival
"The grassroots movement for locally produced goods and independently
owned businesses now sweeping the country is having a measurable impact
on the choices people make."
— Stacy Mitchell, from her IndyWeek article
The Dirty Tricks Behind Local-Washing
"The financial system as a whole has had the characteristics of a Ponzi

scheme if we look at it fundamentally."
— Tim Lee, economic consultant
"The need for tax shifting—lowering income taxes while raising taxes on
environmentally destructive activities—in order to get the market to tell the

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