Environmental Quotes - Page 23

• Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

  Lester R. Brown

  Children, Air, Breathing

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• Corporate polluters, their phony think tanks and political toadies like to marginalize environmentalists as tree huggers, or radicals. But there is nothing radical about clean air or water.

  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

  Thinking, Air, Water

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• Draconian limits on economic growth and on the use of the automobile should not be necessary in order to give Americans clean air at levels they are willing to pay for, but it will require significant Federal, State, and local leadership and innovative approaches from government and industry.

  George H. W. Bush

  Government, Air, Order

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• Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.

  Barry Commoner

  Ecosystems, Degradation, Substance

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• Perhaps the simplest example is a synthetic plastic, which unlike natural materials, is not degraded by biological decay. It therefore persists as rubbish or is burned-in both cases causing pollution. In the same way, a substance such as DDT or lead, which plays no role in the chemistry of life and interferes with the actions of substances that do, is bound to cause ecological damage if sufficiently concentrated.

  Barry Commoner

  Play, Ddt, Rubbish

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• In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.

  Barry Commoner

  Running, Risk, Substance

  Barry Commoner (2014). “The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology”, p.122, Knopf

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• If we are really serious about protecting the environment, the discharge pipes and stacks of industry would all plug directly into their intake side, and costs would not be externalized to a voiceless environment.

  Wes Jackson

  Cost, Voiceless, Sides

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• Tragically, some people are genetically more susceptible than others to agripoisons and industrial pollutants. Genetic engineering to correct these medical problems is a narrow (reductionistic) and instrumental (mechanistic) response to a problem that is fundamentally conceptual: namely, our attitude toward life and our mistreatment of the Earth, plants, and animals-and ourselves in the process.

  Michael Fox

  Attitude, Animal, Medical Problems

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• If you visit American city, You will find it very pretty. Just two things of which you must beware: Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air. Pollution, pollution, They got smog and sewage and mud. Turn on your tap and get hot and cold running crud. See the halibuts and the sturgeons Being wiped out by detergents. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, But they don't last long if they try. Pollution, pollution, You can use the latest toothpaste, And then rinse your mouth with industrial waste.

  Tom Lehrer

  Running, Cities, Two

  "Pollution" (song) (1965)

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• Industrial vomit...fills our skies and seas. Pesticides and herbicides filter into our foods. Twisted automobile carcasses, aluminum cans, non-returnable glass bottles and synthetic plastics form immense middens in our midst as more and more of our detritus resists decay. We do not even begin to know what to do with our radioactive wastes - whether to pump them into the earth, shoot them into outer space, or pour them into the oceans. Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.

  Alvin Toffler

  Ocean, Sea, Sky

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• Just a little rain falling all around The grass lifts its head to the heavenly sound Just a little rain, just a little rain What have they done to the rain? Just a little boy standing in the rain The gentle rain that falls for years And the grass is gone and the boy disappears And the rain keeps falling like helpless tears And what have they done to the rain? Just a little breeze out of the sky The leaves nod their heads as the breeze blows by Just a little breeze with some smoke in its eye And what have they done to the rain?

  Malvina Reynolds

  Fall, Rain, Eye

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• Man is suddenly becoming aware that by an ill-considered exploitation of nature he risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation. Not only is the material environment becoming a permanent menace - pollution and refuse, new illness and absolute destructive capacity - but the human framework is no longer under man's control, thus creating an environment for tomorrow which may well be intolerable. This is a wide-ranging social problem which concerns the entire human family.

  Pope Paul VI

  Men, Creating, Risk

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• Native communities are focal points for the excrement of industrial society.

  Winona LaDuke

  Community, Pollution, Focal Point

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• Now our biggest environmental problems come from our own actions, our own choices, rather than pollution produced by big business.

  Jesse Ventura

  Choices, Action, Problem

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• Of all the problems of conservation, none is more urgent that the polluted air which endangers the American people. We have been fortunate so far. But we have seen that when winds fail to blow, the concentrations of poisonous clouds over our cities can become perilous.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Blow, Clouds, Air

  Johnson, Lyndon B. (1970). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968-1969”, p.361, Best Books on

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• Air pollution is a threat to health, especially of older persons. It contributes significantly to the rising rates of chronic respiratory ailments. It stains our cities and towns with ugliness, soiling and corroding whatever it touches. Its damage extends to our forests and farmlands as well. The economic toll for our neglect amounts to billions of dollars each year.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Years, Cities, Air

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• One third of all of our cancers are from tobacco. It's one of the big killers in America and more than half of our kids still have environmental tobacco smoke exposure when environmental tobacco smoke is known to be associated with sudden infant death syndrome, with ear infections, respiratory infections and the rest. If we had to pick something to really go after, that would be one that I would really argue is an extraordinarily high priority and something people can actually do something about.

  Richard Jackson

  Cancer, Kids, America

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• Fifteen percent of Russia badly polluted.

  Vladimir Putin

  Russia, Fifteen, Pollution

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• The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

  Wendell Berry

  Sacrifice, Ecosystems, Community

  Wendell Berry (2001). “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World”

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• The "hole in the moral ozone" is really what's behind the hole in the ozone.

  Leonard Sweet

  Ozone, Moral, Pollution

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• The American people today are involved in a warfare more deadly than the war in Vietnam, but few of them seem aware of it and even fewer of them are doing anything about it. This is a war that is being waged against the American environment, against our lands, air, and water, which are the basis of that environment.

  Norman Cousins

  War, Air, Land

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• The air is full of a farewell- deserted by the silver lake lies the wild world, overturned. Cities rise where the mountains fell, the furnace where the phoenix burned

  Kathleen Raine

  Lying, Farewell, Lakes

  Kathleen Raine (1989). “Selected Poems”, p.20, SteinerBooks

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• The nuclear peril is usually seen in isolation from the threats to other forms of life and their ecosystems, but in fact it should be seen at the very center of the ecological crisis, as the cloud-covered Everest of which the more immediate, visible kinds of harm to the environment are the mere foothills.

  Jonathan Schell

  Ecosystems, Clouds, Facts

  Jonathan Schell (2000). “The Fate of the Earth: And, The Abolition”, p.111, Stanford University Press

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• The reality of life is that we are exposed to a multiplicity of toxic substances.

  Al Meyerhoff

  Reality, Toxic, Substance

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• With chemicals, it's shoot first and ask questions later.

  Al Meyerhoff

  Firsts, Pollution, Chemicals

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