Environmental Quotes - Page 13

• This planet might be able to support perhaps as many as half a billion people who could live a sustainable life in relative comfort. Human populations must be greatly diminished, and as quickly as possible to limit further environmental damage.

  Eric Pianka

  People, Support, Comfort

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• Bolivia is in the lead internationally in talking about the threat of environmental catastrophe. It's generally true where there are indigenous populations, there are important things happening; where the indigenous populations have been marginalized or exterminated, things go to a disaster. This is true worldwide, and Bolivia is striking because it's a majority population and in the lead.

  Noam Chomsky

  Talking, Important, Majority

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• The risks of transporting deadly nuclear waste, the environmental justice impacts and the long-term health effects of both these projects are untenable...We cannot afford to be silent on these important issues.

  James Cromwell

  Impact, Environmental Health, Issues

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• It is really important to solve the problem of rational utilization and distribution of wate supplies. I dare say, the shortage of fresh water is the major ecological problem of this moment.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Water, Important, Problem

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• Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By "they" I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.

  Thomas Merton

  Real, Rain, Mean

  Thomas Merton (1966). “Raids on the Unspeakable”, p.9, New Directions Publishing

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• Man's history is woven into waterways, for not only did he live beside them, but he used them as highways for hunting, exploration, and trade. Water assured his welfare, its absence meant migration or death, its constancy nourished his spirit. A mountain, a desert, or a great forest might serve his need of strength, but water reflects his inner needs.

  Sigurd F. Olson

  Men, Hunting, Water

  Sigurd F. Olson (2012). “Wilderness Days”, p.44, U of Minnesota Press

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• The problem with water, though, is that the shortfalls don't show up until the very end. You can go on pumping unsustainably until the day you run out. Then all you have is the recharge flow, which comes from precipitation. This is not decades away, this is years away. We're already seeing huge shortages in China, where the Yellow River runs dry for part of each year. The Yellow River is the cradle of Chinese civilization. It first failed to reach the sea in 1972, and since 1985 it's run dry for part of each year. For 1997 it was dry for 226 days.

  Lester R. Brown

  Running, Years, Sea

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• The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!

  Archibald MacLeish

  Rain, Roots, Water

  Archibald MacLeish (1985). “Collected Poems, 1917-1982”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate the world....There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Sea, Water

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• The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water-the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.

  John the Apostle

  Stars, Spring, Angel

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• The trouble with water-and there is trouble with water-is that they're not making any more of it. They're not making any less, mind, but no more either. There is the same amount of water in the planet now as there was in prehistoric times.

  Marq de Villiers

  Water, Mind, Trouble

  Marq De Villiers (2001). “Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource”, p.12, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse.

  George MacDonald

  Oxygen, Rushing, White

  George Macdonald (2012). “Unspoken Sermons Series I, II, and III”, p.250, Simon and Schuster

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• Uncle Sam took up the challenge in the year of '33 For the farmer and the factory and all of you and me. He said, "Roll along Columbia. You can ramble to the sea, But river while you're ramblin' you can do some work for me."

  Woody Guthrie

  Uncles, Years, Sea

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• Water is life. We are the people who live by the water. Pray by these waters. Travel by the waters. Eat and drink from these waters. We are related to those who live in the water. To poison the waters is to show disrespect for creation. To honor and protect the waters is our responsibility as people of the land.

  Winona LaDuke

  Responsibility, Land, People

  Winona LaDuke (2002). “The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings”, p.55, Voyageur Press (MN)

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• Strip the hills, drain the boglands, and you create flood conditions inevitably. Yet that is what we have been doing for years.

  Hal Borland

  Years, Water, Hills

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• Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning.

  Herman Melville

  Brother, Crazy, Boys

  Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.9

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• You may talk o' gin and beer When you're quartered safe out 'ere, An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it; But when it comes to slaughter You will do your work on water, An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Fighting, Beer, Water

  Rudyard Kipling (1994). “The Collected Poems of Rudyard Kipling”, p.418, Wordsworth Editions

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• Inanimate objects are sometimes parties to litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole - a creature of ecclesiastical law - is an acceptable adversary, and large fortunes ride on its cases... So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.

  William O. Douglas

  Party, Technology, Air

  "Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727". U.S. Supreme Court case, supreme.justia.com. April 19, 1972.

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• The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes - fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.

  William O. Douglas

  Men, Animal, Rivers

  "Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727". U.S. Supreme Court case, supreme.justia.com. April 19, 1972.

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• Modern man has no real "value" for the ocean. All he has is the most crass form of egoist, pragmatic value for it. He treats it as a "thing" in the worst possible sense, to exploit it for the "good" of man. The man who believes things are there only by chance cannot give things a real value. But for the Christian the value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Christian, Real, Believe

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• One effect of benefit-cost analysis is to give any respectable engineer or economist a means for justifying almost any kind of project the national government wants to justify... Exclusive reliance on benefit-cost analysis has been one of the greatest threats to wise decisions in water development.

  Gilbert F. White

  Wise, Mean, Government

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• One of the signs of the imminent Apocalypse is the "bitterness of all waters," and anyone traveling through eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union and its satellites-everywhere that the command economy operated, with its callous disregard for anything but narrow-focused abstract principle-could be forgiven for thinking that the Apocalypse was no longer imminent but in full cry. There's hardly a river, stream, or brook that isn't contaminated with the runoff from human misuse, whether industrial effluents, agricultural pesticides and herbicides, or worse.

  Marq de Villiers

  Thinking, Europe, Rivers

  Marq De Villiers (2001). “Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource”, p.87, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Per capita availability of good, potable water is diminishing in all developed and developing countries.

  Marq de Villiers

  Country, Availability, Water

  Marq de Villiers (2001). “Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource”, p.41, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Perhaps one of the most meaningful ways to sense the impact of the environmental crisis is to confront the question which is always asked about Lake Erie: how can we restore it? I believe the only valid answer is that no one knows. For it should be clear that even if overnight all of the pollutants now pouring into Lake Erie were stopped, there would still remain the problem of the accumulated mass of pollutants in the lake bottom.

  Barry Commoner

  Meaningful, Believe, Lakes

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• Although the United States has made tremendous progress cleaning up its water by removing billions of pounds of pollutants and doubling the number of waterways safe for fishing and swimming, a majority of Americans live within 10 miles of a polluted lake, river, stream or coastal area.

  Carol Browner

  Swimming, Fishing, Rivers

  "EPA says U.S. economy depends on clean water". www.cnn.com. June 9, 2000.

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