Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.
There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be no place to put it all.
Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.
We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.
Water is life's matter and matrix, mother and medium. There is no life without water.
There is an increasing sense of what can be called legal pollution.
No one has the right to use America's rivers and America's Waterways, that belong to all the people. as a sewer. The banks of a river may belong to one man or one industry or one State, but the waters which flow between the banks should belong to all the people.
Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution.
Those concerns of a national character-such as air and water pollution that do not respect state boundaries, or the national transportation system, or efforts to safeguard your civil liberties-must, of course, be handled on the national level.
We still have too much air and water pollution and we still need to work to reduce it. But we also need to put the problem of pollution into a historical as well as scientific perspective.
Fast food may appear to be cheap food and, in the literal sense it often is, but that is because huge social and environmental costs are being excluded from the calculations. Any analysis of the real cost would have to look at such things as the rise in food-borne illnesses, the advent of new pathogens, antibiotic resistance from the overuse of drugs in animal feed, extensive water pollution from intensive agricultural systems and many other factors. These costs are not reflected in the price of fast food.
Industrial agriculture now accounts for over half of America's water pollution. Two years ago, Pfiesteria outbreaks connected with wastes from industrial chicken factories forced the closure of two major tributaries of the Chesapeake and threatened Maryland's vital shellfish industry. Tyson Foods has polluted half of all streams in northwestern Arkansas with so much fecal bacteria that swimming is prohibited. Drugs and hormones needed to keep confined animals alive and growing are mainly excreted with the wastes and saturate local waterways.
Water is one of the most basic of all needs - we cannot live for more than a few days without it. And yet, most people take water for granted. We waste water needlessly and don't realize that clean water is a very limited resource. More than 1 billion people around the world have no access to safe, clean drinking water, and over 2.5 billion do not have adequate sanitation service. Over 2 million people die each year because of unsafe water - and most of them are children!
The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution.
or simply:
