Environmental Quotes - Page 21

• 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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• 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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• 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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• There is no doubt that we live in an age of unprecedented, and sometimes terrifying, technological advance where the speed of advance so often outstrips the necessary ethical considerations.

  Prince Charles

  Doubt, Age, Stewardship

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• ... for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents-many emblazoned with warnings such as "CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy"-show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew.

  Michael Grunwald

  Years, Toxic Waste, Pounds

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• ... laws governing pollution tend to move pollutants from one medium to another. So, for example, we scrub SO2 from power plants only to dispose toxic sludge on land. We "clean" water only to disperse toxic-laced solids on farmland or landfills. Pollution control becomes a kind of giant shell game by which we move pollutants between air, water, groundwater, and land.

  David W. Orr

  Moving, Air, Law

  David W. Orr (2011). “Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr”, p.113, Island Press

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• ... the fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Past, Men, Typical

  Kenneth E. Boulding, Harold J. Barnett, Rene Dubos, Leonard J. Duhl, Ralph Turvey, Roland N. McKean, Allen V. Kneese, M. Mason Gaffney, Gilbert F. White, David Lowenthal, Norton E. Long, Jacob H. Beuscher (1966). “Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy”

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• We can change our thinking. Rather than viewing the chemical adulteration of our environment and our bodies as the inevitable practice of convenience and progress, we can decide that cancer is inconvenient and toxic pollution archaic and primitive. We can start seeing the creation of carcinogens as the result of outmoded technologies. We can demand green engineering and green chemistry. We can let our systems of industry and agriculture know that they are suffering from a design flaw.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Cancer, Technology, Thinking

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• Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.

  Barry Commoner

  Air, Cities, Achievement

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• An unfolding technology has increased our economic strength and added to the convenience of our lives. But that same technology-we know now-carries danger with it. From the great smoke stacks of industry and from the exhausts of motors and machines, 130 million tons of soot, carbon and grime settle over the people and shroud the Nation's cities each year. From towns, factories, and stockyards, wastes pollute our rivers and streams, endangering the waters we drink and use.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Technology, Years, Cities

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• The debris of civilization litters the landscapes and spoils the beaches. Conservation's concerns now is not only for man's enjoyment-but for man's survival.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Beach, Men, Civilization

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1970). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968-1969”, p.356, Best Books on

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• And there are other dangers potentially more dangerous than even nuclear war. There is AIDS. There is terrorism. There are drugs and more to the point the darkness of our time that makes people seek escape in drugs. There is the slow poisoning of what we call "the environment" of all things as if with that absurdly antiseptic phrase we can conceal from ourselves that what we are really poisoning is home, is here, is us.

  Frederick Buechner

  War, Home, People

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• Each summer, for example, nitrogen and phosphate washing from farmlands in the Mississippi Valley enter the Gulf of Mexico, creating a massive algal bloom covering some 16,000 square kilometers. As the blooms die off, this area-roughly the size of New Jersey-is so deprived of oxygen that no fish survive.

  Lester R. Brown

  Summer, Squares, Oxygen

  Lester R. Brown, Michael Renner (2014). “Vital Signs 1999-2000: The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future”, p.25, Routledge

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• Anyone who studies our poisonous drugs, our denatured food, our deathtrap automobiles and houses, our lung-rotting cities, must concede that we accept a good deal of murder as inevitable simply because it is done to make or save money.

  Joy Davidman

  Cities, House, Drug

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• As currently written, the laws require certain manufacturers and users of such chemicals to report any and all environmental releases-either accidental or routine-to air, water, or soil. The Toxics Release Inventory is the main registry of such events, and it is available to the public through the Environmental Protection Agency. It is hardly comprehensive. Toxic emissions reported to the federal government are thought to account for only 5 percent of all chemical releases.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Agency, Government, Air

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• It is essential that we take steps to prevent chemical substances from becoming environmental hazards. Unless we develop better methods to assure adequate testing of chemicals, we will be inviting the environmental crisis of the future.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Essentials, Hazards, Substance

  Nixon, Richard M. (1972). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1971”, p.132, Best Books on

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• By 1990, the EPA had tallied up 32,645 sites of past chemical waste dumping in need of cleanup. Some of these are actual waste landfills, but many are former manufacturing sites where drums full of chemicals have been simply abandoned. The names of the most notorious appear on the EPS's National Priorities List. These are the so-called Superfund sites, names for the super fund of money put together by Congress in 1980 to clean them up. In 2009, the Superfund list contained 1,331 sites.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Past, Names, Priorities

  Sandra Steingraber (2010). “Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment”, p.69, Da Capo Press

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• Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.

  Ernest Becker

  Men, Devastation, Worship

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• I find man utterly unaware of what his wealth is or his fundamental capability is. He says time and again, "We can't afford it." For instance, we are saying now that we can't afford to do anything about pollution but after the costs of not doing something about pollution have multiplied many fold beyond what it would cost to correct it now, we will spend many fold what it would cost us now to correct it.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Men, Cost, Wealth

  R. Buckminster Fuller “World Game Series: Document 1”, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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• Here in the United States, a study of nearly 700 women in California showed an increased risk of fetal death among babies whose mothers lived near crops when certain pesticides were sprayed. The largest risks were found among pregnant women exposed during the critical first trimester and among those who lived in the same square mile where pesticides were used.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Mother, Baby, Squares

  Sandra Steingraber (2012). “Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood”, p.94, Da Capo Press

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• Industrialized countries have disproportionately more cancers than countries with little or no industry (after adjusting for age and population size). One half of all the world's cancers occur in people living in industrialized countries, even though we are only one-fifth of the world's population. Closely tracking industrialization are breast cancer rates, which are highest in North America and northern Europe, intermediate in southern Europe and Latin America, and lowest in Asia and Africa.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Country, Cancer, Latin

  "Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment". Book by Sandra Steingraber, 1997.

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