Environmental Quotes - Page 21

• 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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• The issue of world environment has a special kind of urgency... The issue is one of rich peoples and poor peoples, of the growing gap between the two, and of the rich fouling their own nests.

  Gilbert F. White

  Two, Issues, Special

  Gilbert F. White (1986). “Geography, Resources and Environment, Volume 1: Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White”, p.289, University of Chicago Press

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• Wealth and riches, that is, an estate above what sufficeth our real occasions and necessities, is in no other sense a 'blessing' than as it is an opportunity put into our hands, by the providence of God, of doing more good.

  John Tillotson

  Real, Blessing, Opportunity

  John Tillotson (1717). “The works of the most reverend Dr. John Tillotson containing two hundred sermons and discourses, on several occasions ...”, p.673

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• Who so hath his mind on taking, hath it no more on what he taketh.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Mind, 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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• Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.

  Rachel Carson

  War, Animal, Men

  Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.8, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately. If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods.

  Carol Browner

  Color, Class, Community

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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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• Another agricultural trend of growing concern is the increased nutrient content of coastal waters resulting from fertilizer runoff in agricultural regions. Augmented by urban sewage discharge in some situations, this results in huge algal blooms, which, as they die and decay, deplete the oxygen content in the water, leading to the death of the fish.

  Lester R. Brown

  Oxygen, Water, Decay

  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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• 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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• Brothers and Sisters: Our ancient homeland is spotted today with an array of chemical dumps. Along the Niagara River, dioxin, a particularly deadly substance, threatens the remaining life there and in the waters which flow from there. Forestry departments spray the surviving forests with powerful insecticides to encourage tourism by people seeking a few days or weeks away from the cities where the air hangs heavy with sulphur and carbon oxides.

  Winona LaDuke

  Brother, Powerful, Air

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• The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures.

  Winona LaDuke

  Animal, Lakes, Land

  Winona LaDuke (1999). “All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life”, p.17, South End Press

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• Indeed, the quantity of PCBs still in use plus the quantity still languishing in waste dumps exceeds the total amount that has already escaped into the general environment. Without a program to recall and contain them, semivolatile PCBs will continue to insinuate themselves into the food chain for decades.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Use, Waste, Pollution

  Sandra Steingraber (2012). “Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood”, p.136, Da Capo Press

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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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• God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation. Commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it... They are environmentalists. Being deeply connected with their environment is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God has made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence. This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues.

  Rob Bell

  Spiritual, Responsibility, Order

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