Environmental Quotes - Page 20

• There is a price to be paid for fabricating around us a society which is as artifical and as mechanized as our own, and this is that we can exist in it only on condition that we adapt ourselves to it. This is our punishment.

  Philip Sherrard

  Punishment, Stewardship, Paid

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• There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here, and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why. Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that we dare not enter or possess.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Earth, Sacred, Limits

  Barbara Kingsolver (2011). “Small Wonder”, p.87, Faber & Faber

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• There seems in most countries to be either one extreme or the other. Truly a paradise could exist wherever material progress and spiritual values could be properly balanced.

  Malcolm X

  Country, Spiritual, Progress

  Malcolm X (2015). “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”, p.401, Ballantine Books

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• We are a part of everything that is beneath us, above us, and around us. Our past is our present, our present is our future, and our future is seven generations past and present.

  Winona LaDuke

  Past, Generations, Stewardship

  Winona LaDuke (1999). “All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life”, p.12, South End Press

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• We can be confident that action which is in accord with a few basic beliefs cannot be wrong and can at least testify to the values we will need to cultivate. These are the beliefs that the human race is a family that has inherited a place on the earth in common, that its members have an obligation to work toward sharing it so that none is deprived of the elementary needs for life, and that all have a responsibility to leave it undegraded for those who follow.

  Gilbert F. White

  Responsibility, Race, Earth

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• We can only live the changes we wish to see: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create. We must break the obsolete social and economic systems that divide the world between the over-privileged and the under-privileged. Each of us, whether government leader or protester, business executive or worker, professor or student, share a common guilt.

  Ivan Illich

  Thinking, Government, Leader

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• We have failed...through our lack of responsible awareness...and thus added to suffering around the world. All of us are cripples-some physically, some mentally, some emotionally. We must, therefore, strive cooperatively to create a new world. There is no time left for destruction, for hatred, for anger. We must build, in hope and joy and celebration.

  Ivan Illich

  Joy, Hatred, Suffering

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• We do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for the world of nature because we do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for ourselves. It is because we cripple and mutilate ourselves that we cripple and mutilate everything else as well. Our contemporary crisis is really our own depravity writ large.

  Philip Sherrard

  World, Stewardship, Depravity

  Philip Sherrard (1992). “Human image, world image: the death and resurrection of sacred cosmology”, Sophia Perennis

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• We face a fundamental question which can be described as both ethical and ecological. How can accelerated development be prevented from turning against man? How can one prevent disasters that destroy the environment and threaten all forms of life, and how can the negative consequences that have already occurred be remedied?

  Pope John Paul II

  Men, Faces, Negative

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• We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Wind, Land, Rivers

  Madeleine L'Engle (1986). “A Stone for a Pillow”, Shaw

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• Who ever saw his old clothes, - his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Boys, Clothes, Coats

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.24, Graphic Arts Books

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• Whoever is gripped by God's spirit turns to his creation with all the interest that comes from God's love.

  Eberhard Arnold

  Spirit, Stewardship, Creation

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• You have established the earth and it continues. All things stand this day according to your directions. For all things are your servants (Ps. 119:91). God himself loves the earth dearly and never takes his hands off it. And because he loves it and it is good, our care of it is also eternal work and a part of our eternal life.

  Dallas Willard

  Hands, Self Love, Earth

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• Across the continent, on the shores of small tributaries, in the shadows of sacred mountains, on the vast expanse of the prairies, or in the safety of the woods, prayers are being repeated, as they have for thousands of years, and common people with uncommon courage and the whispers of their ancestors in their ears continue their struggles to protect the land and water and trees on which their very existence is based. And like small tributaries joining together to form a mighty river, their force and power grows.

  Winona LaDuke

  Prayer, Struggle, Years

  Winona LaDuke (2002). “The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings”, p.64, Voyageur Press (MN)

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• What gives these corporations like CONOCO, SHELL, EXXON, DIASHAWA, ITT, RIO TINTO ZINC, and the WORLD BANK a right which supercedes or is superior to my human right to live on my land, or that of my family, my community, my nation, our nations, and to us as women?

  Winona LaDuke

  Zinc, Land, Giving

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• He made the earth first and peopled it with dumb creatures, and then He created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and the sweat of has face for bread.

  William Faulkner

  Humility, Men, Animal

  Francis Lee Utley, William Faulkner, Lynn Z. Bloom, Arthur F. Kinney (1971). “Bear, man, and God: eight approaches to William Faulkner's The bear”, Random House Inc

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• I find it difficult to accept that it is the will of God that humanity should degrade, deface, desolate, and ultimately perhaps destroy His Creation on Earth. Yet this is the course on which we are embarked.

  Russell E. Train

  Humanity, Earth, Stewardship

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• I think the work in front of us is the first work task given our forbearers, which is to care for the garden. Now because it's the first thing commanded, maybe it's the first thing forgotten. But it is the first admonition and it is absolutely unequivocal. It is part of right livelihood.

  Wes Jackson

  Thinking, Garden, Tasks

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• If there is neither excessive wealth nor immoderate poverty in a nation, then justice may be said to prevail.

  Thales

  Justice, May, Poverty

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• A food waste reduction hierarchy-feeding people first, then animals, then recycling, then composting-serves to show how productive use can be made of much of the excess food that is currently contributing to leachate and methane formation in landfills.

  Carol Browner

  Animal, People, Hierarchy

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• It is God's world still. It has been given to man not absolutely, but in trust, that man may work out in it the will of God; given-may we not say?-just as a father gives a child a corner of his great garden, and says, "There, that is yours; now cultivate it."

  Phillips Brooks

  Children, Father, Men

  Phillips Brooks, John Cotton Brooks (1910). “Sermons: Visions and tasks, and other sermons”

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• It is doubtful that the dissection of living animals and plants could be done by those who believe them to be holy. A pantheist would not view trees as so many board feet in the manner a Christian would. A pantheist would be less likely to measure the number of acre feet coming over a waterfall than his Christian descendent, centuries later who had become a scientist. That which is sacred would be handled with a certain reverence.

  Wes Jackson

  Christian, Believe, Animal

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• It strikes me as being morally repulsive and intellectually absurd that people die of want in a world of surplus.

  Bob Geldof

  People, World, Want

  "U2, Coldplay among bands to play in Live 8". www.today.com. May 31, 2005.

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• Our stewardship of the Earth is brief. We owe it to those who follow to keep that in perspective, to be responsible passengers along the way.

  George H. W. Bush

  Perspective, Earth, Way

  George H.W. Bush (2009). “Speaking of Freedom: The Collected Speeches”, p.64, Simon and Schuster

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• Some recent occurrences such as the BSE disaster and even perhaps - dare I mention it - the present severe weather conditions in our country are, I have no doubt, the consequences of mankind's arrogant disregard of the delicate balance of nature. We have to find a way of ensuring that our remarkable and seemingly beneficial advances in technology do not just become the agents of our own destruction.

  Prince Charles

  Country, Technology, Weather

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