Ecology and Environment

We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave—to the ancient enemies of man—half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all.

 

The world has changed. I see it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it. J. R. R.

We haven’t got too much time left to ensure that government of the earth, by the earth, for the earth, shall not perish from the people.

Don’t you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?

 

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of beingregarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if the town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let’s not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet.

To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

I am I plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter I do not preserve myself.

He that plants trees loves others beside himself.

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Until the Desert knows That Water grows His Sands suffice But let him once suspect That Caspian Fact Sahara dies.

The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.

It is your human environment that makes climate

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

Even the richest soil, if left uncultivated will produce the rankest weeds.

One can have no more mastery over the environment, than one has over himself.

Water is the driving force of all nature.