Environmental Quotes - Page 19

• I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -sproing!- with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do.

  Douglas Coupland

  Mean, Thinking, Years

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• I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Errors, Intellectual, Age

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

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• If the flower were not attached to its stem, it would flee at the approach of man, like the insect or the bird; for the attribute of man on the earth, at least as long as he does not better understand his role, is to worry and frighten what he is not interested in taming for utilitarian purposes. Man is skillful in mistreating everything he can use

  Andre Gide

  Flower, Men, Worry

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• In losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of creation.

  Wendell Berry

  Fellowship, Losing, Stewardship

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• Judaism calls for us to honor the rhythm of human life, the demands of the human community around us, the call of the divine order as the filter and scale for the decisions that drive our own small lives. We do not rule the universe, Judaism reminds us. God does. We are not its standard or its norms. We are only its keepers, its agents, its stewards. To do right by the universe at large is the measure of a happiness framed with the entire cosmos in mind but lived in microcosms across time.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Divine Order, Community, Decision

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• Nature does require her times of preservation.

  William Shakespeare

  Doe, Stewardship, Preservation

  1613 Wolsey to Henry. Henry VIII, act 3, sc.2, l.147-8.

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• Now there are heavy houses everywhere and more of them are being built. In fact, it is only when more houses are being constructed that some countries consider their economics healthy. Yet each house is a heavy footprint on the Earth. Just as all our possessions represent-if we cannot learn ways of sharing them-a weight and clutter that often means the faces of future generations will look up into darkness and the pressure on the Earth of "things."

  Alice Walker

  Country, Mean, House

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• One cannot use with impunity the different categories of beings-animals, plants, the natural elements-simply as one wishes, according to economic needs. One must take into account the nature of each being and its mutual connection in an ordered system, which is the cosmos.

  Pope John Paul II

  Animal, Wish, Different

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• Our age is one in which usefulness is thought to be the chief merit of nature; in which the attainment of power, the utilization of its resources is taken to be the chief purpose of man in God's creation. Man has indeed become primarily a tool-making animal, and the world is now a gigantic tool box for the satisfaction of his needs.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Taken, Men, Animal

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1976). “God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism”, p.34, Macmillan

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• Our earth is like a child who has grown up without parents, having no one to guide her... Some have attempted to help her but most have simply tried to use her. Humans, who have been given the task to lovingly steer the world, instead plunder her with no consideration, other than their immediate needs. And they give little thought for their own children who will inherit their lack of love. So they use her and abuse her with little consideration and then when she shudders of blows her breath. They are offended and raise their fist at God.

  William P. Young

  Children, Blow, Giving

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• Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines.

  Carl Jung

  World, Machines, Stewardship

  Carl Gustav Jung, Meredith Sabini (2002). “The Earth Has a Soul: The Nature Writings of C.G. Jung”, p.122, North Atlantic Books

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• Our problem with limited resources is not primarily overpopulation; it is greed. Our problem with pollution is not the invention of fluorocarbons or mass transport; it is irresponsibility. The loss of an acre of forest every second, the mass slaughter of elephants for their ivory, the extinction of entire species of plants, insects and animals all over the world is not something that "just happens" because there are more of us human beings. It happens because the race of ruling beings put in charge has almost wholly lost its sense of stewardship. We have turned away from God.

  Winkie Pratney

  Loss, Animal, Race

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• Our time on earth and our energy, intelligence, opportunities, relationships, and resources are all gifts from God that he has entrusted to our care and management. We are stewards of whatever God gives us. This concept of stewardship begins with the recognition that God is the owner of everything and everyone on earth. ... We never actually own anything during our brief stay on earth. God just loans the earth to us while we're here. It was God's property before you arrived, and God will loan it to someone else after you die.

  Rick Warren

  Opportunity, Giving, Time On Earth

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• Our view of nature will influence the way we treat nature, and our view of human nature will affect our understanding of human responsibility.

  Ian Barbour

  Responsibility, Views, Understanding

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• Obviously, if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable inquiries, then Christians, regardless of their organizations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy-which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life.

  Wendell Berry

  Christian, Organization, Our World

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• Take care how you place your moccasins upon the Earth, step with care, for the faces of the future generations are looking up from the Earth waiting their turn for life.

  Wilma Mankiller

  Waiting, Steps, Generations

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• Technologically, modern man does everything he can do-he functions on this single boundary principle. Modern man, seeing himself as autonomous, with no personal-infinite God who has spoken, has no adequate universal to supply an adequate second boundary condition; and man being fallen is not only finite, but sinful. Thus man's pragmatically made choices have no reference point beyond human egotism. It is dog eat dog, man eat man, man eat nature.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Dog, Men, Choices

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• The future of our fragile, beautiful planet home is in our hands. As God's family, we are stewards of God's creation. We can be wantonly irresponsible, or we can be caring and compassionate. God says, "I have set before you life and death... Choose life."

  Desmond Tutu

  Beautiful, Home, Caring

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• The idea that we are "stewards of the earth" is another symptom of human arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body's physical processes. Do you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you make your kidneys function? Can you control the removal of waste? Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries, or the fact that you are losing a hundred thousand skin cells a minute?

  Lynn Margulis

  Cells, Blood, Ideas

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• We are unconscious of most of our body's processes, thank goodness, because we'd screw it up if we weren't. The human body is so complex, with so many parts...a system which is far more complex than we can fully imagine. The idea that we are consciously care-taking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous.

  Lynn Margulis

  Ideas, Body, Care

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• The message from all quarters is the same: our undisciplined consumption must end. If we continue to gobble up our resources without any regard to stewardship and to spew out our deadly wastes over land, sea, and air, we may well be drawing down the final curtain upon ourselves.

  Richard J. Foster

  Drawing, Air, Sea

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• The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth.

  Stewart Udall

  Giving, Earth, Common

  Stewart L. Udall (1963). “The Quiet Crisis”

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• The poor old earth which has mothered us and nursed us we treat with scant respect. Our awe and veneration we reserve for the worlds we know not of. Our senses sell us out. The mud on our shoes disenchants us.

  John Burroughs

  Shoes, Mud, World

  John Burroughs (1921). “The Writings of John Burroughs”

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• The time has come when we cannot be so careless. Unless we do better, we may suffer through a stark emergency of the environment. We may create a hostile world: a world to bruise ourselves against; a world of sprawling cities, unplanned or badly planned; a world whose water is full of sludge, whose winds are full of soot; a world whose landscape has been totally neglected, stripped, marred, and wasted. All of this need not happen if we choose well, and particularly if we plan well and if we act well.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Wind, Cities, Water

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• There is a growing threat to the environment, to the vegetation, animals, water and air. Sacred Scripture hands us the image of Cain who rejects his responsibility: 'Am I my brother's keeper?' The Bible shows the human person as his brother's keeper and the guardian of creation which has been entrusted to him.

  Pope John Paul II

  Brother, Responsibility, Animal

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