Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

 
~Henry David Thoreau Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us. 
~Henrik Tikkanen

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they
happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.  ~Havelock I'm not an environmentalist.  I'm an Earth warrior.  ~Darryl Cherney, quoted
Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923 in Smithsonian, April 1990

There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.  I think the environment should be put in the category of our national
~Mohandas K. Gandhi security.  Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. 
Otherwise what is there to defend?  ~Robert Redford, Yosemite National
Park dedication, 1985
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.  ~Robert Orben
Let us a little permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her
own affairs than we.  ~Michel de Montaigne, translated
It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. 
It was yours.  ~Greenpeace advertisement, New York Times, 25 February
1990 We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.  ~Thomas Fuller,
Gnomologia, 1732

Modern technology
Owes ecology Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible - or even sinful - that you
An apology. burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!  ~Paul
~Alan M. Eddison MacCready, Jr.

In America today you can murder land for private profit.  You can leave the We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our
corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops.  ~Paul Brooks, The Pursuit of children.  ~Native American Proverb
Wilderness, 1971

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth.  We are all crew.  ~Marshall

Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find.  ~Quoted in Time McLuhan, 1964

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.  ~William Newspapers:  dead trees with information smeared on them.  ~Horizon,
Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990 "Electronic Frontier"

When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.  ~James G. Watt, quoted in
liable to a fine of $50.  When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is Newsweek, 8 March 1982
richly rewarded.  ~Pat Brown, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on
Advertising, 1985
I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If
sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries
ago.  ~Sir George Porter, quoted in The Observer, 26 August 1973
The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the
world there comes a hungry stomach.  Rather it is that, attached to those
The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does hands are sharp elbows.  ~Paul A. Samuelson, Newsweek, 12 June 1967
not own the sun.  ~Ralph Nader, quoted in Linda Botts, ed., Loose Talk,
1980
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the
streets after them.  ~Bill Vaughn
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.  When
we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with
love and respect.  ~Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac For 200 years we've been conquering Nature.  Now we're beating it to death. 
~Tom McMillan, quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap, 1990

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their
revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.  If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the
~Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958 Wastepaper Age.  ~Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect, 1959

I am the earth.  You are the earth.  The Earth is dying.  You and I are I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less
murderers.  ~Ymber Delecto time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness
and respecting her seniority.  ~Elwyn Brooks White, Essays of E.B. White,
1977
The packaging for a microwavable "microwave" dinner is programmed for a
shelf life of maybe six months, a cook time of two minutes and a landfill
dead-time of centuries.  ~David Wann, Buzzworm, November 1990 The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made
solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire
merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages.  ~Savinien de Cyrano
So bleak is the picture... that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may de Bergerac, États et empires de la lune, 1656
turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century.  ~Philip
Shabecoff, New York Times Magazine, 4 June 1978
Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea,
and is so bold as to challenge her in her work.  ~Pliny the Elder, The Natural
Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress.  ~John History, translated by Philemon Holland
Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain, 1957

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,

And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that ~George Carlin
which had no further use.  And soon the earth was covered with plastic bags
and aluminum cans and paper plates and disposable bottles and there was
nowhere to sit down or walk, and Man shook his head and cried:  "Look at A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger
this Godawful mess."  ~Art Buchwald, 1970 father with a bigger fist.  If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your
prayers, it's taken personally.  Hear only silence long enough, and you start which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.  ~Robert
wondering about his power.  His fairness.  His very existence.  But if a world Lynd, The Blue Lion and Other Essays
mother doesn't reply, Her excuse is simple.  She never claimed conceited
omnipotence.  She has countless others clinging to her apron strings,
including myriad species unable to speak for themselves.  To Her elder
offspring She says - go raid the fridge.  Go play outside.  Go get a job.  Or, Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? 
better yet, lend me a hand.  I have no time for idle whining.  ~David Brin Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a
canary in a pet shop window?  When the only wild animal he knows is a rat -
glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum?  When the only tree he
Why do people give each other flowers?  To celebrate various important touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on
occasions, they're killing living creatures?  Why restrict it to plants?  Christmas morning?  ~Frank N. Ikard, North American Wildlife and Natural
"Sweetheart, let's make up.  Have this deceased squirrel."  ~The Washington Resources Conference, Houston, March 1968
Post
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt
Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying,
his own nature.  ~Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future, 1964 with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only
machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?  ~Charles A.
Lindbergh, Reader's Digest, November 1939
When you defile the pleasant streams
And the wild bird's abiding place,
You massacre a million dreams It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a
And cast your spittle in God's face. tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating
~John Drinkwater electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and
moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and
blood.  ~Bernand De Voto, Fortune, June 1947
A virgin forest is where the hand of man has never set foot.  ~Author
Unknown
Take care of the earth and she will take care of you.  ~Author Unknown

When a man says to me, "I have the intensest love of nature," at once I know
that he has none.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 1857 We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.  ~Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr.

I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few
are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.  ~Author Unknown Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining
wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into
comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining
When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves.  ~David Orr members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last
clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through
the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own
We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.  ~Francis Bacon country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive
waste.  ~Wallace Stegner, letter to David E. Pesonen of the Wildland
Research Center, 3 December 1960 (Thanks, Bekah)
There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in
 the world.  ~John Muir
Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains,
and atomies infinity.  ~E. Knight
You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one. 
Opie, you haven't finished your milk.  We can't put it back in the cow, you ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de
know.  ~Aunt Bee Taylor, The Andy Griffith Show l'inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755

The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty.  The activist is the man Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their
who cleans up the river.  ~Ross Perot operations.  ~David Gerrold

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.  ~Richard Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall.  He will end by
Bach destroying the earth.  ~Albert Schweitzer, quoted in James Brabazon, Albert
Schweitzer

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the

environment.  ~Ansel Adams The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted
children.  ~Paul R. Ehrlich

We say we love flowers, yet we pluck them.  We say we love trees, yet we cut
them down.  And people still wonder why some are afraid when told they are Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts lesions
loved.  ~Author Unknown upon the earth.  ~Ian McHarg

Take nothing but pictures. Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values.... God
Leave nothing but footprints. made life simple.  It is man who complicates it.  ~Charles A. Lindbergh,
Kill nothing but time. Reader's Digest, July 1972
~Motto of the Baltimore Grotto, a caving society
The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over
Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above himself.  ~Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 1953
him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?  ~Pierre Troubetzkoy
The old Lakota was wise.  He knew that man's heart away from nature
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.  ~Richard P. Feynman led to lack of respect for humans too.  ~Chief Luther Standing Bear

Humankind has not woven the web of life.  We are but one thread within it.  The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature - nothing is safe from
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.  All things are bound the idiot marks of man's passing.  ~Loudon Wainwright
together.  All things connect.  ~Chief Seattle, 1855
Every day is Earth Day.  ~Author Unknown
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of
Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called
stardust?  ~Lane Olinghouse It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now
be threatened by the activities of one form of that life.  ~Rachel Carson

Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit.  If you violate her laws you are your
own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.  ~Luther Burbank God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of
the west... keeping the world in chains.  If [our nation] took to similar
economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.  ~Mahatma
Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like Gandhi
geographical strata or layers of cake.... During a recent landfill dig in
Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you
might read one over breakfast.  ~William Rathje, The Economist, 8 It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times.... What the Dickens is going
September 1990 on here?  ~Denton Morrison, on chemicals, technology, and risk, quoted in
National Academy of Sciences, Improving Risk Communication, 1989

Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe
nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away.  Man is a complex being:  he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.  ~Gil Stern
~Stephanie Mills, ed., In Praise of Nature, 1990

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological

How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?... Everywhere the white clock.  Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant
man has touched it, it is sore.  ~Anonymous Wintu Woman perhaps of the messages buried in its long history.  Let us hope that we are
still in the early morning of our April day.  ~Stephen Jay Gould, "Our
Allotted Lifetimes," The Panda's Thumb, 1980
Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves
as the central nervous system or the brain of nature.  We're not the brain, we
are a cancer on nature.  ~Dave Foreman, Harper's, April 1990 Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.  ~David Ehrenfeld, The
Arrogance of Humanism, 1978

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. 

~Carl Sagan The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps
the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality.... Whole
forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality.  ~Irving
The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and Babbitt
poetry, and all that is spiritual.  ~John Muir, letter to J.B. McChesney, 19
September 1871
Drive Nature forth by force, she'll turn and rout
The false refinements that would keep her out.
Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and ~Horace, Odes
he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. 
~Henry David Thoreau, "Chesuncook," The Maine Woods, 1848
Nature always strikes back.  It takes all the running we can do to remain in
the same place.  ~Rene Dubos, Medical Utopias, 1961
Man maketh a death which Nature never made.  ~Edward Young
 survive.  ~Albert Einstein
In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development
of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment.  ~Richard
Wilkinson Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can
add to what he's been given.  But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a
destroyer.  Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become
Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day. 
Americans as having a higher [quality of life] not because of what it has, but ~Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, 1897
rather because of what it does not have!  ~Don A. Dillman, Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1977
A human being is part of the whole, called by us "Universe," a part limited in
time and space.  He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as
We have been god-like in the planned breeding of our domesticated plants, something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his
but rabbit-like in the unplanned breeding of ourselves.  ~Arnold Toynbee consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our
personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our task
must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of
Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole [of] nature in its
time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back.  ~Rene beauty.  ~Albert Einstein, 1950
Dubos, Mirage of Health, 1959

A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things - including man. 
Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well All life forms obey Nature's demands - except man, who has found ways of
become the great scarcities of tomorrow.  ~Edwin Way Teale, Autumn ignoring them.  ~Eugene M. Poirot, Our Margin of Life, 1978
Across America, 1956

When you use a manual push mower, you're "cutting" down on pollution and
Waste is a tax on the whole people.  ~Albert W. Atwood the only thing in danger of running out of gas is you!  ~Grey Livingston

It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man After a visit to the beach, it's hard to believe that we live in a material world. 
and nature.  ~Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854 ~Pam Shaw

The rose has thorns only for those who would gather it.  ~Chinese Proverb As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog
across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves
seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another
Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on planet to say about us:  "With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran
silence.  Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas," or, "They went on
and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... playing politics until their world collapsed around them."  ~U Thant, speech,
tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and 1970
trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads
monstrously like a gray vegetation.  ~Jean Arp
The command "Be fruitful and multiply" was promulgated, according to our
authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people. 
We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to ~William Ralph Inge, More Lay Thoughts of a Dean, 1931
 effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned
population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. 
Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, was a major factor in the And that is the tragedy.  It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to
development of the Western worldview.... A basic Christian belief was that destroy but the quality of human life.  ~René Dubos, quoted in Life, 28 July
God gave humans dominion over creation, with the freedom to use the
environment as they saw fit.  Another important Judeo-Christian belief 1970
predicted that God would bring a cataclysmic end to the Earth sometime in
the future.  One interpretation of this belief is that the Earth is only a
temporary way station on the soul's journey to the afterlife.  Because these One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I
beliefs tended to devalue the natural world, they fostered attitudes and decreed the death penalty for burning of coal.  At least one execution for that
behaviors that had a negative effect on the environment.  ~Donald G. offense is recorded.  But economics triumphed over health considerations,
Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000:  Protecting Our Global
and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.  ~Glenn T.
Environment, 1996
Seaborg, Atomic Energy Commission chairman, speech, Argonne National
Laboratory, 1969
For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now
subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of
conception until death.  ~Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962 Our children may save us if they are taught to care properly for the planet;
but if not, it may be back to the Ice Age or the caves from where we first
emerged.  Then we'll have to view the universe above from a cold, dark
I realized that Eastern thought had somewhat more compassion for all living
things.  Man was a form of life that in another reincarnation might possibly place.  No more jet skis, nuclear weapons, plastic crap, broken pay phones,
be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer.  So a man of such a faith, looking drugs, cars, waffle irons, or television.  Come to think of it, that might not be
at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors.  In the East the a bad idea.  ~Jimmy Buffet, Mother Earth News, March-April 1990
wilderness has no evil connotation; it is thought of as an expression of the
unity and harmony of the universe.  ~William O. Douglas, Go East, Young
Man, 1974 Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common
denominator in our exploitative economic system.  ~Channing E. Phillips,
speech, Washington, D.C., 22 April 1970
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich
state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago.  If insects were to
vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.  ~Edward O. Wilson The days a man spends fishing or spends hunting should not be deducted
from the time that he's on earth.  In other words, if I fish today, that should
be added to the amount of time I get to live.  That's the way I look at
Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him.  But recreation.  That's why I'll be a big conservation, environmental President,
as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot because I plan to fish and hunt as much as I possibly can.  ~George Bush,
be entirely dead.  ~Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics, 1977 quoted in Los Angeles Times, 30 December 1988

The human race will be the cancer of the planet.  ~Julian Huxley, attributed The desire to build a risk-free society has always been a sign of decadence.  It
has meant that the nation has given up, that it no longer believes in its
destiny, that it has ceased to aspire to greatness, and has retired from history
Man will survive as a species for one reason:  He can adapt to the destructive
to pet itself.  ~Henry Fairlie, quoted in Conservation Foundation Letter,
November 1981
There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves,
that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet.  ~Brooke
The exquisite sight, sound, and smell of wilderness is many times more Medicine Eagle
powerful if it is earned through physical achievement, if it comes at the end
of a long and fatiguing trip for which vigorous good health is necessary. 
Practically speaking, this means that no one should be able to enter a This is a beautiful planet and not at all fragile.  Earth can withstand
wilderness by mechanical means.  ~Garrett Hardin, The Ecologist, February significant volcanic eruptions, tectonic cataclysms, and ice ages.  But this
1974 canny, intelligent, prolific, and extremely self-centered human creature had
proven himself capable of more destruction of life than Mother Nature
herself.... We've got to be stopped.  ~Michael L. Fischer, Harper's, July 1990
The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more
difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with
ourselves.  We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies.  ~Al When the soil disappears, the soul disappears.  ~Ymber Delecto
Gore

Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them.  But those who
Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day.  But teach a man how to fish, and respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more. 
he'll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years.  ~Charles Haas ~Edwin Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons, 1953

You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the
of your grandfathers.  So that they will respect the land, tell your children midst of abundance.  ~Buddha
that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin.  Teach your children what we
have taught our children, that the earth is our mother.  Whatever befalls the
earth befalls the sons of the earth.  If men spit upon the ground, they spit To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land
upon themselves.  ~Native American Wisdom instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining
in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to
hand down to them amplified and developed.  ~Theodore Roosevelt, seventh
The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self- annual message, 3 December 1907
adjusting, self-cleansing.  Not so with technology.  ~E.F. Schumacher, Small
is Beautiful, 1973
Today's world is one in which the age-old risks of humankind - the drought,
floods, communicable diseases - are less of a problem than ever before.  They
The tourist business is a trap, it is a tained honey; have been replaced by risks of humanity's own making - the unintended side-
Man clearly should have stayed in bed, and not invented money. effects of beneficial technologies and the intended effects of the technologies
~Kenneth E. Boulding, "The Ballad of Ecological Awareness," in M. Taghi of war.  Society must hope that the world's ability to assess and manage risks
Farvar and John P. Milton, eds., The Careless Technology, 1972 will keep pace with its ability to create them.  ~J. Clarence Davies, quoted in
Conservation Foundation, State of the Environment: An Assessment at Mid- Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes,
Decade, 1984 running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime
pits, and debris.  ~Edward Abbey

U.S. consumers and industry dispose of enough aluminum to rebuild the

commercial air fleet every three months; enough iron and steel to We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the
continuously supply all automakers; enough glass to fill New York's World Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man. 
Trade Center every two weeks.  ~Environmental Defense Fund ~Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," 1967
advertisement, Christian Science Monitor, 1990

The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution
Water flows uphill towards money.  ~Anonymous, saying in the American in the history of our culture.  By destroying pagan animism, Christianity
West, quoted by Ivan Doig in Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986 made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of
natural objects.  ~Lynn I. White, Jr., Science, 10 March 1967

Living in the midst of abundance we have the greatest difficulty in seeing

that the supply of natural wealth is limited and that the constant increase of The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the
population is destined to reduce the American standard of living unless we Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.  ~René Dubos, The Wooing of
deal more sanely with our resources.  ~W.H. Carothers Earth, 1980

We have always had reluctance to see a tract of land which is empty of men We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age.  If the projections are
as anything but a void.  The "waste howling wilderness" of Deuteronomy is right, it's going to be a big one:  the ecological collapse of the planet. 
typical.  The Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as wild or uncultivated ~Jeremy Rifkin, World Press Review, 30 December 1989
land which is occupied "only" by wild animals.  Places not used by us are
"wastes."  Areas not occupied by us are "desolate."  Could the desolation be
in the soul of man?  ~John A. Livingston, in Borden Spears, ed., Wilderness Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative
Canada, 1970 that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo:  not merely the duty to
foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally
the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they
We must not be forced to explore the universe in search of a new home are offered, without respect to their human consequences.  ~Lewis Mumford
because we have made the Earth inhospitable, even uninhabitable.  For if we
do not solve the environmental and related social problems that beset us on
Earth - pollution, toxic contamination, resource depletion, prejudice, When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a
poverty, hunger - those problems will surely accompany us to other worlds.  vandal.  When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman. 
~Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz, Biosphere 2000:  Protecting ~Joseph Wood Krutch
Our Global Environment, 1996

When some high-sounding institute states that a compound is harmless or a

process free of risk, it is wise to know whence the institute or the scientists Loyd:  "It has to do with keeping things in balance.  It's like the spirits have
who work there obtain their financial support.  ~Lancet, editorial on the made a deal with us.  We're on our own.  The spirits have been good enough
"medical-industrial complex," 1973 to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying:  We know how nice
you're being.  We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate
the deer we took.  Sorry if we messed up anything.  You've gone to a lot of
When we Indians kill meat, we eat it all up.... When we build houses, we trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."
make little holes.  When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don't ruin Codi:  "Like a note you'd send somebody after you'd stayed in their house?"
things.  We shake down acorns and pinenuts.  We don't chop down the trees.  Loyd:  "Exactly like that.  'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch.  I took
~Wintu Indian, quoted in Julian Burger, The Gaia Atlas of First Peoples, some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup.  Sorry, I hope it
1990 wasn't your favorite one.'"
~Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism

towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American
people and our ecological systems.  ~Janet Holmes à Court enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief.  Or stupid.  A nation of
amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today.  Assuming the
land could also forget what had been done to it.  ~Barbara Kingsolver,
With laissez-faire and price atomic, Animal Dreams
Ecology's Uneconomic,
But with another kind of logic
Economy's Unecologic. In an underdeveloped country, don't drink the water; in a developed country,
~Kenneth E. Boulding, in Frank F. Darling and John P. Milton, eds., Future don't breathe the air.  ~Changing Times magazine
Environments of North America, 1966

You go into a community and they will vote 80 percent to 20 percent in favor
of a tougher Clean Air Act, but if you ask them to devote 20 minutes a year to
having their car emissions inspected, they will vote 80 to 20 against it.  We
are a long way in this country from taking individual responsibility for the
environmental problem.  ~William D. Ruckelshaus, former EPA
administrator, New York Times, 30 November 1988

Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once

were in their natural habitat.  If the right policies toward nature were
pursued, we would need no zoos at all.  ~Michael Fox, Sierra, November-
December 1990