Stewardship Quotes - Page 6

• The poor old earth which has mothered us and nursed us we treat with scant respect. Our awe and veneration we reserve for the worlds we know not of. Our senses sell us out. The mud on our shoes disenchants us.

  John Burroughs

  Shoes, Environmental, Mud

  John Burroughs (1921). “The Writings of John Burroughs”

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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, Environmental

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• If more politicians in this country were thinking about the next generation instead of the next election, it might be better for the United States and the world.

  Claude Pepper

  Country, Thinking, United States

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• We owe at least this much to future generations, from whom we have borrowed a fragile planet called Earth.

  Maurice Strong

  Generations, Earth, Planets

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• I owe nothing to Women's Lib.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Feminism

  1974 Quoted in the Observer,1 Dec.

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• There is a growing threat to the environment, to the vegetation, animals, water and air. Sacred Scripture hands us the image of Cain who rejects his responsibility: 'Am I my brother's keeper?' The Bible shows the human person as his brother's keeper and the guardian of creation which has been entrusted to him.

  Pope John Paul II

  Brother, Responsibility, Animal

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• I mean five thousand years ago people emerge out of nowhere -sproing!- with brains and everything and begin wrecking the planet. You'd think we'd give the issue a little more thought than we do.

  Douglas Coupland

  Mean, Thinking, Years

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• A billion homo sapiens are added every 11 years to the planet. The hypertrophy of a single species pushes other life-forms out of bed and into extinction. The decline of biological diversity is real and severe. The alarming loss of soil fertility, forest cover, and coral reef viability and the release of fossilized CO2 that nature put away 300 million years ago in its march toward greater diversity - all these "losses" and many others are the result of one life-form annihilating other life-forms in its immoral confusion of "dominion" with "domination."

  Leonard Sweet

  Real, Loss, Years

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• After all, the living book of God's creation lies open for all to see; it points constantly to the divine calling for which we were placed in nature. Nature is a continual admonition to us, for nowhere has God's creation departed so far from its origin and primeval purpose as in the human race.

  Eberhard Arnold

  Lying, Book, Race

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• 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, Environmental, Paid

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• ... if we are serious about helping nature, we need to be willing to forego material benefits.

  Douglas J. Moo

  Needs, Benefits, Serious

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• If you do not give the tenth part to God, he will take the nine parts.

  Ambrose

  Giving, Nine, Ifs

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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, Environmental, Generations

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

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• We are unconscious of most of our body's processes, thank goodness, because we'd screw it up if we weren't. The human body is so complex, with so many parts...a system which is far more complex than we can fully imagine. The idea that we are consciously care-taking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous.

  Lynn Margulis

  Ideas, Environmental, Body

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• Our global forests are the lungs of the world, and protecting them is fundamental for our survival. When we hand these forests over to future generations, we must be able to say we exercised our stewardship wisely and responsibly

  Edward Davey

  Nature, Hands, Survival

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• I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Errors, Intellectual, Environmental

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

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• If the flower were not attached to its stem, it would flee at the approach of man, like the insect or the bird; for the attribute of man on the earth, at least as long as he does not better understand his role, is to worry and frighten what he is not interested in taming for utilitarian purposes. Man is skillful in mistreating everything he can use

  Andre Gide

  Flower, Men, Worry

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• ... it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world.

  Wendell Berry

  Drinking, Community, Environmental

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

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• The very metaphor Paul chooses for this decisive moment in his argument shows that what he has in mind is not the unmaking of creation or simply its steady development, but the drastic and dramatic birth of new creation from the womb of the old.

  N. T. Wright

  Mind, Development, Birth

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• All our language about the future ... is like a set of signposts pointing into a bright mist ... the New Testament image of the future hope of the whole cosmos, grounded in the resurrection of Jesus, gives as coherent a picture as we need or could have of the future that is promised to the whole world, a future in which, under the sovereign and wise rule of the creator God, decay and death will be done away with and a new creation born, to which the present one will stand as mother to child.

  N. T. Wright

  Wise, Mother, Jesus

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• ... the world of nature is by no means absent from the eschatological program set out in the NT. While rarely rising to the level of an explicit emphasis, and never the chief concern in and of itself, the world of nature is an integral component of God's new creation work.

  Douglas J. Moo

  Mean, Rising, World

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• Christians should seek the best information available about the earth over which we have been appointed stewards.

  Douglas J. Moo

  Christian, Earth, Information

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• The time has come when we cannot be so careless. Unless we do better, we may suffer through a stark emergency of the environment. We may create a hostile world: a world to bruise ourselves against; a world of sprawling cities, unplanned or badly planned; a world whose water is full of sludge, whose winds are full of soot; a world whose landscape has been totally neglected, stripped, marred, and wasted. All of this need not happen if we choose well, and particularly if we plan well and if we act well.

  Lyndon B. Johnson

  Wind, Cities, Water

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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, Environmental

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

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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

  Environmental, Earth, Sacred

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

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