Pollution Quotes - Page 16

• Life isn't long enough to do all you could accomplish. And what a privilege even to be alive. In spite of all the pollutions and horrors, how beautiful this world is. Supposing you only saw the stars once every year. Think what you would think. The wonder of it!

  Tasha Tudor

  Life, Beautiful, Appreciation

  69 Copy quote

• Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. And if you poled your flatboat in that river you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future. This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours wasted minutes years of repetition and time that has been killed.

  Harlan Ellison

  Fighting, Past, Years

  Harlan Ellison (1989). “Harlan Ellison's watching”

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

  Wendell Berry

  Lakes, Sea, Fishing

  Wendell Berry (2004). “Citizenship Papers: Essays”, p.157, Counterpoint Press

  87 Copy quote

  Show source

• I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.

  John Twelve Hawks

  Drinking, Airports, News Stories

  4 Copy quote

• Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.... Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

  Charles Dickens

  Dirty, Clouds, Fog

  4 Copy quote

• Think of negative speech as verbal pollution. And that's what I've been doing: visualizing insults and gossip as a dark cloud, maybe one with some sulfur dioxide. Once you've belched it out, you can't take it back. As grandma said, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. The interesting this is, the less often I vocalize my negative thoughts, the fewer negative thoughts I cook up in the first place.

  A. J. Jacobs

  Nice, Grandma, Dark

  A. J. Jacobs (2011). “A.J. Jacobs Omnibus: The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment”, p.791, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost--to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves.

  Michael Pollan

  Animal, Ninety Nine, Oil

  4 Copy quote

• We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it's hard to reach the drive-through window at McDonald's from a speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Horse, Cancer, Mcdonalds

  "Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut" by P. J. O'Rourke, (1st edition ed.), New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996.

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• Economics has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Addiction, Growth, Cost

  Kenneth E. Boulding (1985). “Collected Papers: Toward the Twenty-First Century : Political Economy, Social Systems, and World Peace”, University Press of Colorado

  24 Copy quote

  Show source

• In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops.

  Paul Brooks

  Land, America, Environmental

  Paul Brooks (1971). “The pursuit of wilderness”

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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, Environmental

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

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Environmental, Essentials, Hazards

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

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Environmental, Use, Waste

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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry-between say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off." Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.

  Wendell Berry

  War, Differences, Risk

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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”

  15 Copy quote

  Show source