ECOLOGY QUOTES

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We must not be forced to explore the universe in search of a new home 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, poverty, hunger - those problems will surely accompany us to other worlds.
~ Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz

"With our technologies--ones of incalcuable power: earth-restoring, planet preserving--we can rediscover an intimacy, a mutuality with the natural world, that is not primitive (though based in part on fear), but knowing. It might even be possible to relearn a life of awe. And inhabit the landscape without violation. With the least violation."
~ Janet Kauffman

"Solar is cost effective right now. When you consider the cost to our health from air pollution, solar is just as competitive as any other energy source."
~ Thomas P. Kay

 

* "The supreme reality of our time is...the vulnerability of our planet"
~ John F. Kennedy

"It is our task in our time and in our generation, to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours."
~ John F. Kennedy

"We in Government have begun to recognize the critical work which must be done at all levels—local, State and Federal—in ending the pollution of our waters."
~ Robert F. Kennedy

* "We protect nature not for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities..."
~ Robert Kennedy, Jr.

* "the most patriotic thing you can do is to take care of the environment and try to live sustainably."
~ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

* "Listen, the environmental movement is not about protecting the fishes and the birds so much as recognizing that nature is the infrastructure of our communities ... If you're saying the values that drive the environmental movement are uncool and antithetical to America, then I would argue just the opposite. If you think being patriotic is not cool, I'd say that's not true either. I'd say the most patriotic thing you can do is to take care of the environment and try to live sustainably."
~ Robert F. Kennedy

"What we are fighting for is not just the fishes and the birds. We protect nature not for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities, and if we want to meet the obligations of our civilization and our culture which are to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as the communities that our parents gave us, we've got to start by protecting that infrastructure; the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the landscapes that enrich us. We're not protecting nature for nature's sake. We're protecting it because it enriches us, yes, it enriches our economy and we ignore that at our peril. But it is also enriching us aesthetically, recreationally, culturally, historically and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites besides money. And if we don't feed them, we're not going to grow up…we're not going to become the kind of beings that our creator intended us to become."
~ Robert Kennedy, Jr.

The environment is the most important, the most fundamental, civil-rights issue.... Four out of every five toxic-waste dumps in America is in a black neighborhood.
~ Robert Kennedy, Jr.

I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market...
~ Robert Kennedy, Jr.

* We are living in a science-fiction nightmare where children are gasping for breath on bad-air days because somebody gave money to a politician. And my children and the kids of millions of other Americans can no longer go fishing and eat their catch because somebody gave money to a politician.
~ Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atomies infinity.
~ E. Knight

"If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers."
~ Joseph Wood Krutch

"In the area of species protection, we should concern ourselves with what is right as opposed to what might be easier, or popular in the short term."
~ Richard Leakey

* Green is a label for a certain attitude to life, a certain kind of respect that one might have for the very source of things that we take for granted.
-- Annie Lennox

* That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
~ Aldo Leopold

"Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm."
~ Aldo Leopold

"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land."
~ Aldo Leopold

"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

"Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech."
~ Aldo Leopold

"All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."
~ Aldo Leopold

We have always had reluctance to see a tract of land which is empty of men as anything but a void. The "waste howling wilderness" of Deuteronomy is typical. The Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as wild or uncultivated 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

"Rely on renewable energy flows that are always there whether we use them or not, such as, sun, wind and vegetation: on energy income, not depletable energy capital."
~ Amory Lovins

"The environment isn't over here. The environment isn't over there. You are the environment."
~ Chief Oren Lyons

"If you have a clean environment, you will have a healthy atmosphere. This will make you happy and your happiness will bring joy to your parents and it will affect the community, too. Then there will be peace of mind to one and all."
~ Chief Oren Lyons

* We can still alter our course. It is NOT too late. We still have options. We need the courage to change our values to the regeneration of our families, the life that surrounds us.
~ Chief Oren Lyons

 

* "The young generation can influence their elders and can make them understand the environmental problems that are faced by us today. The youth can make them see that our environment is deteriorating day by day."
~ Chief Oren Lyons

"If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear. People who can open to the web of life that called us into being".
-- Joanna Macy

 

* "Every one of us can make a contribution. And quite often we are looking for the big things and forget that, wherever we are, we can make a contribution. Sometimes I tell myself, I may only be planting a tree here, but just imagine what's happening if there are billions of people out there doing something. Just imagine the power of what we can do."
~ Wangari Maathai

"It is wrong to suppose the world was created primarily to serve mankind's purposes and pleasures. A conviction about having dominion over land and water and living things breeds ideas of unwarranted self importance. It is a sobering thought that man's place in Nature's scheme is, after all, a small one."
~ J. Grant MacEwan

* "Out of all those millions and millions of planets floating around there in space, this is our planet, this is our little one, so we just got to be aware of it and take care of it."
~ Paul McCartney

* "Let us pledge our lives and fortunes to aid the great task of Earth's rejuvenation, and with confidence and faith, each do our part as a trustee of Earth to take charge and take care of our planet."
~ John McConnell,
the Founder of Earth Day

"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."
~ Marshall McLuhan

* EARTH DAY reminds the people of the world of the need for continuing care which is vital to Earth’s safety.
~ Margaret Mead

* "We won't have a society if we destroy the environment"
~ Margaret Mead

 

"EARTH DAY uses one of humanity’s great discoveries, the discovery of anniversaries by which, throughout time, human beings have kept their sorrows and their joys, their victories, their revelations and their obligations alive, for re-celebration and re-dedication another year, another decade, another century, another eon. EARTH DAY reminds the people of the world of the need for continuing care which is vital to Earth’s safety. …EARTH DAY draws on astronomical phenomena in a new way; using the vernal equinox, the time when the Sun crosses the equator making night and day of equal length in all parts of theEarth. To this point in the annual calendar, EARTH DAY attaches no local or divisive set of symbols, no statement of the truth or superiority of one way of life over another. But the selection of the March equinox makes planetary observance of a shared event possible. The vernal equinox calls on all mankind to recognize and respect Earth’s beautiful systems of balance, between the presence of animals on land, the fish in the sea, birds in the air, mankind, water, air, and land. Most importantly there must always be awareness of the actions by people that can disturb this precious balance."
~ Margaret Mead

 

* “As the ongoing industrial crusade to turn all earthly life to commercial purpose relentlessly impoverishes the biosphere and human culture, our living images of graceful possibility dwindle.”
~ Stephanie Mills

What little wilderness remains displays the patterns we must return to, if our species and as many others as now remain are to persist here a while. Ideally this would call for a broad cultural rapprochment with the wild, a long overdue armistice in civilization’s war upon it.
~ Stephanie Mills

We cannot learn freedom and responsibility within the confines of our own species. We cannot understand life and death and what they are for in exclusively human terms. Without that which is wild, the world becomes a cell block.
~ Stephanie Mills

 

* Basically we should stop doing those things that are destructive to the environment, other creatures, and ourselves and figure out new ways of existing.
-- Moby

Arbor Day is not like other holidays. Each of those reposes on the past, while Arbor Day proposes for the future."
~ J. Sterling Morton, Founder of Arbor Day

"The cultivation of trees is the cultivation of the good, the beautiful, and the ennobling in man, and for one, I wish to see it become universal."
~ J. Sterling Morton, Founder of Arbor Day

 

* "Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed."
~ J. Sterling Morton, Founder of Arbor Day

* When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
~ John Muir

* "The battle we have fought, and are still fighting for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it ... So we must count on watching and striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for."
~ John Muir

* These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.
~ John Muir

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.
~ John Muir

"...Unfortunately, MAN is in the woods, and waste and pure destruction are making rapid headway. If the importance of forests were at all understood, even from an economic standpoint, their preservation would call forth the most watchful attention of government."
~ John Muir

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
~ John Muir

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
~ John Muir

Tug on anything at all and you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe.
~ John Muir

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
~ Ralph Nader

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
~ Native American Proverb

"Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
~ Native American Proverb

 

* "The fate of the living planet is the most important issue facing mankind."
~ Gaylord Nelson

Sleeping in the Forest
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts,
her pockets full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before,
a stone on the riverbed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts,
and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me,
the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom.
By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

-- Mary Oliver

When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves.
~ David Orr

 

Ecology Quotes

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World Water Day - March 22

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