Environmental Quotes - Page 16

• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• A sustainable economy represents nothing less than a higher social order one as concerned with future generations as with our own, and more focused on the health of the planet and the poor than on material acquisitions and military might. While it is a fundamentally new endeavor, with many uncertainties, it is far less risky than continuing with business as usual.

  Lester R. Brown

  Military, Order, Might

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• Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to over-all improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis is a warning that we have delayed nearly too long.

  Barry Commoner

  Ecosystems, Long, Effort

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• But the basic value of a sustainable society, the ecological equivalent of the Golden Rule, is simple: each generation should meet its needs without jeopardizing the prospects for future generations to meet their own needs.

  Alan Thein Durning

  Simple, Golden, Needs

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• Now comes the threat of climate crisis - a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

  Al Gore

  Real, Fate, Challenges

  Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, delivered 10 December 2007, Oslo, Norway

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• The gradual depletion of the ozone layer and the related "greenhouse effect" has now reached crisis proportions as a consequence of industrial growth, massive urban concentrations and vastly increased energy needs. Industrial waste, the burning of fossil fuels, unrestricted deforestation, the use of certain types of herbicides, coolants and propellants: all of these are known to harm the atmosphere and environment.

  Pope John Paul II

  Ozone Layer, Growth, Atmosphere

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• While in some cases the damage already done may well be irreversible, in many other cases it can still be halted. It is necessary, however, that the entire human community - individuals, States and international bodies - take seriously the responsibility that is theirs.

  Pope John Paul II

  Responsibility, Community, Body

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• Christian people should surely have been in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility, because of our doctrines of creation and stewardship. Did God make the world? Does he sustain it? Has he committed its resources to our care? His personal concern for his own creation should be sufficient to inspire us to be equally concerned.

  John Stott

  Christian, Responsibility, People

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• Conservation is sometimes perceived as stopping everything cold, as holding whooping cranes in higher esteem than people. It is up to science to spread the understanding that the choice is not between wild places or people, it is between a rich or an impoverished existence for Man.

  Thomas Lovejoy

  Men, Wild Places, People

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• Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households.

  Wendell Berry

  Community, Heaven, Soul

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.319, Counterpoint

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• But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation. For in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities, and nations. He is a contradicter of the fundamental miracle of life.

  Wendell Berry

  Army, Cities, Miracle

  Wendell Berry (2003). “The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry”, p.319, Counterpoint

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• Entranced by promises of a material paradise of limitless luxury, humanity has too long ignored the mismatch between the imperatives of our existence as living beings on a finite planet and the imperatives of the institutions of money that chart our path to the future. Created to build colonial empires in service to kings, global corporations are ill suited to the task of building just, sustainable, and compassionate civil societies that nurture sufficiency, partnership, and respect for the whole of life.

  David Korten

  Kings, Luxury, Long

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• Corporate globalists and the corporate empires they serve may be at the cutting edge of technological innovation, but socially and environmentally they are relics of a bygone era of imperial colonial rule, elite privilege, and state-sanctioned plunder.

  David Korten

  Cutting, Innovation, May

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• Humans, like all other creatures, must make a difference; otherwise, they cannot live. But unlike other creatures, humans must make a choice as to the kind and scale of difference they make. If they choose to make too small a difference, they diminish their humanity. If they choose to make too great a difference, they diminish nature, and narrow their subsequent choices; ultimately, they diminish or destroy themselves. Nature, then, is not only our source but also our limit and measure.

  Wendell Berry

  Differences, Choices, Humanity

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