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
