Sunday, May 2, 2010 – Environmental Disaster
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, The Pursuit of Wilderness, 1971
Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites. ~ William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990
Because we don’t think about future generations, they will never forget us. ~ Henrik Tikkanen
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 place. No more jet skis, nuclear weapons, plastic crap, broken pay phones, drugs, cars, waffle irons, or television. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea. ~ Jimmy Buffet, Mother Earth News, March-April 1990
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 use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun. ~ Ralph Nader
And Man created the plastic bag and the tin and aluminum can and the cellophane wrapper and the paper plate, and this was good because Man could then take his automobile and buy all his food in one place and He could save that which was good to eat in the refrigerator and throw away that 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 this Godawful mess.” ~ Art Buchwald, 1970
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. ~ Richard P. Feynman
For 200 years we’ve been conquering Nature. Now we’re beating it to death. ~ Tom McMillan
If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age. ~ Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect, 1959
I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less 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
Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust? ~ Lane Olinghouse
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
The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river. ~ Ross Perot
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, 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
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~ Henry David Thoreau
We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap. ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart away from nature becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. ~ Chief Luther Standing Bear
It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. ~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. ~ Carl Sagan
The command “Be fruitful and multiply” was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two people. ~ William Ralph Inge, More Lay Thoughts of a Dean, 1931
We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand. ~ James Watt, Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan
I do not know of any environmental group in any country that does not view its government as an adversary. ~ Harlem Brundtland
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. ~ Gregory Bateson
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 be a horsefly or a bird of paradise or a deer. So a man of such a faith, looking at animals, might be looking at old friends or ancestors. In the East the 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
Give a man a fish, and he can eat for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and he’ll be dead of mercury poisoning inside of three years. ~ Charles Haas
The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity 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
The word “wilderness” occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory. ~ René Dubos, The Wooing of Earth, 1980
We’re finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it’s going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet. ~Jeremy Rifkin, World Press Review, 30 December 1989
To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American 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, Animal Dreams
I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty. ~ George Burns
It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it. ~ Dan Quayle
There is something fundamentally wrong with treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation. ~ Herman Daly
I think that all good, right thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that all good, right thinking people in this country are fed up with being told that all good, right thinking people in this country are fed up with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am.” ~ John Cleese, Monty Python Show
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. ~ John Muir
We’re in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone is arguing over where they’re going to sit. ~ David Suzuki
Just Above Sunset 