"Modern
Society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious
look at its lifestyles."
~ Pope John Paul II (Polish Pope. 1920-2005)
The activist
is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans
up the river.
~ Ross Perot
| *
The environmental movement has led some of the most successful global campaigns
in terms of raising public and political consciousness about the relationship
of environment and development and offering alternatives for better governance
at all levels from community to the international arena.
~ Michele
Perrault |  |
| |
The philosophy that I have
worked under most of my life is that the serious study of natural history is an
activity which has far-reaching effects in every aspect of a person’s life. It
ultimately makes people protective of the environment in a very committed way.
It is my opinion that the study of natural history should be the primary avenue
for creating environmentalists.
~ Roger
Tory Peterson Birds
are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we'll soon
be in trouble.
~ Roger
Tory Peterson *
Not all is doom and gloom. We are beginning to understand the natural world and
are gaining a reverence for life - all life.
~ Roger Tory Peterson |
“The
humane person, the civilized person, readily accepts
not only the humane ethic, as we think of it, but
also the conservationist’s philosophy, as well as
the environmentalists’s point of view. They are overlapping
and interlocking. All are essential to a better and
more civilized world—a reverence for life.” ~ Roger
Tory Peterson
Racial
injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape
have a common denominator in our exploitative economic
system.
~ Channing E. Phillips
"The
purpose of conservation: The greatest good to the greatest number of people for
the longest time."
~ Gifford Pinchot, first Director of the U.S. Forest Service
"What
may be possible for a minority of humankind, albeit at great cost, simply cannot
work for the humankind. Our kind of progress depends on lacerating the Earth,on
gouging out its riches, on stripping is life-sustaining skin of soil and forest,
on poisoning its pure air, on defecating copiously in its pure water... the single
most important indicator of environmental decline is the extent to which the damage
done is reversible. The most heinous ecological crime of all is for any one generation
so seriously to assault the web of life that the damage done is literally irreversible
for every generation that follows."
~ Jonathon Porritt
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
| *
"For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it
beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river,
for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water
supports."
~ Sandra
Postel *
"Water is finite and we have not done a great job of managing it in the past."
~ Sandra
Postel |  |
"We must protect
the forests for our children, grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must
protect the forests for those who can't speak for themselves such as the birds,
animals, fish and trees."
-- Qwatsinas (Hereditary Chief Edward Moody), Nuxalk
Nation
It's incredible to
see labor unions and environmentalists getting together to stop the corporate
mentality that destroys both jobs and the environment.
-- Bonnie
Raitt | 
|
| |
*
I
think the environment should be put in the category
of our national security. Defense of our resources
is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise
what is there to defend? ~ Robert
Redford
*
The
measure of our success will be the condition
on which we leave the world for the next generation.
~ Robert Redford
|
"We’ve
poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things
have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different.
We’re running out of resources and we are running out of time."
~ Robert
Redford
"If
we want energy security, then we have to reduce our appetite for fossil fuels.
There's no other way. Other issues may crowd the headlines, but this is our fundamental
challenge. Big challenges require bold action and leadership. To get the United
States off fossil fuels in this uneasy national climate of terrorism and conflict
in the Persian Gulf, we must treat the issue with the urgence and persistance
it deserves. The measure of our success will be the condition on which we leave
the world for the next generation.
~ Robert
Redford
"To
secure our environmental legacy for future generations, we must find ways to reconcile
humanity more satisfactorily with the natural systems upon which all human life
and civilizations depend. We must recognize that the natural systems of which
we are part have an intrinsic worth transcending narrow utilitarian values. They
must be preserved for their own sake. No philosopher or religious thinker has
been more sensitive to this intimate relationship between humanity and nature
than St. Francis of Assisi. The powerful contemporary environmental tradition
of preservation, of reverence for wilderness and protection for all living things
- the ideal that sees, as John Muir said, ‘in God’s wildness... the hope of the
world’ - virtually began with St. Francis."
-- William K. Reilly, U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency
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
"I
used to think of the environment as trees and blue sky. Then I learned that for
some people, the environment is gangs and concrete. All the issues that we face
are connected. Worldwide, ecosystems are being destroyed, and indigenous peoples
are losing their homelands and their entire way of life. Three out of every five
African-Americans and Latinos in the US lives in a community with a toxic waste
site. As long as pollution is being produced, it's going to go somewhere, and
as long as there are marginalized communities where land is cheaper and the people
don't have the time or the money to fight back, polluters will have a place to
deposit toxins. As long as people and the planet are being exploited, and billions
of dollars are being made precisely because laborers and the environment are being
abused and used up, there will be children going hungry and ecological destruction.
As long as war and violence are in our hearts and our streets as well as in our
nations, as long as corporate greed and unsustainable consumption are at the forefront
of our economies, no child will be born into a truly safe, peaceful or loving
world."
~ Ocean Robbins
|
*
As long as people and the planet are being exploited, and billions of dollars
are being made precisely because laborers and the environment are being abused
and used up, there will be children going hungry and ecological destruction.
~ Ocean
Robbins |  |
| |
*
If we think systematically, we will stop asking, "How much is nature worth?" We
will know that we are a piece of nature ourselves.
~ Karl-Henrik
Robčrt |
*
“It’s
very important that we expand our use of clean energy and make a long-term commitment
to it.
-- Julia Roberts
“It’s very important
that we expand our use of clean energy and make a long-term commitment to it.
Biodiesel and ethanol are better for the environment and for the air we breathe.The
use of biodiesel is a positive step toward minimizing pollutive emissions and
greenhouse gases. By focusing on school buses, we can affect the health and wellbeing
of the people most susceptible to that pollution – our children – today.”
-- Julia Roberts |
|
*
...conservation of land
and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand.
-- Eleanor
Roosevelt | 
|
| 
| *
"A nation that destroys it's soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our
land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people."
~ Franklin
D. Roosevelt |
There
is nothing so American as our national parks. The scenery and wildlife are native.
The fundamental idea behind the parks is native. The parks stand as the outward
symbol of this great human principle.
~ Franklin
D. Roosevelt
The
throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also
the lives of men.
~ Franklin
D. Roosevelt
"Leave
it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it."
~
Theodore Roosevelt,
1903 *
"The nation behaves
well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the
next generation increased, and not impaired in value."
~ Theodore
Roosevelt | 
|
To
waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land 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
"I
feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was
old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates."
~ Theodore
Roosevelt
"I
recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural
resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful
use, the generations that come after us."
~ Theodore
Roosevelt
The
function of our Government is to insure to all its citizens, now and hereafter,
their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If we of this generation
destroy the resources from which our children would otherwise derive their livelihood,
we reduce the capacity of our land to support a population, and so either degrade
the standard of living or deprive the coming generations of their fight to life
on this continent.
If
there is any one duty which more than another we owe it to our children and our
children's children to perform at once, it is to save the forests of this country,
for they constitute the first and most important element in the conservation of
the natural resources of this country.
~ Theodore
Roosevelt
You
forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
| *
Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.
~ William
Ruckelshaus, 1st EPA Administrator |  |
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
Ruckelshaus, 1st EPA Administrator
"I
am drawn to the wild not because it is wild but because it is sensible, logical,
ordered, stable, resilient. Wild nature is everything we're struggling to regain."
~ Carl Safina
The
only durable community is the one that embraces the whole planet, wild and tame
. . .
-- Scott Russel Sanders, Voyagers
"A
Healthy Ecology is the Basis for a Healthy Economy."
~ Claudine Schneider, U.S. Representative
| |
*
"Man
talks of a battle with Nature, forgetting that if he won the battle, he would
find himself on the losing side."
~ E.
F. Schumacher *
"We still have to learn
how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature..."
~ E.F. Schumacher
|
The
system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting,
self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
~ E.F.
Schumacher
By
means of trees, wildlife could be conserved, pollution decreased and the beauty
of our landscapes enhanced. This is the way, or at least one of the ways, to spiritual,
moral, and cultural regeneration.
~ E.F.
Schumacher
"We
still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only
with our fellow men but also with nature and, above
all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature
and have made us; for, assuredly, we have not come
about by accident and certainly have not made ourselves"
~ E.F. Schumacher
| *
"Until mankind can extend the circle of his compassion to include all living things,
he will never, himself, know peace."
~ Albert
Schweitzer |  |
"Man
has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the
earth."
~ Albert
Schweitzer
"The
conservationist's most Important task, if we are to
save the earth, is to educate."
~ Peter Scott, founder chairman of the World Wildlife
Federation
| |
*
All things are connected like the blood that unites us, We did not weave the web
of life. We are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
~ Chief Seattle
"Whatever
befalls the earth, befalls the people of the earth."
~ Chief Seattle
|
Humankind
has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do
to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
~ Chief Seattle,
1855
| *
I feel that our planet
is in peril and that creating a sustainable planet for my children and my children’s
children is the most important thing I can do in this lifetime.
-- Kyra
Sedgwick
Ever since I
had my first child I have been passionate in my commitment to preserve our precious
resources for my children and their children’s children. This is the obligation
of all of us visiting this planet for a limited time.
-- Kyra
Sedgwick |
|
| *
Just as with other great words, the word environment means different things. You
might say that a cave woman twenty thousand years ago sweeping out the cave was
improving the environment. Many people improving the environment think only in
terms of the air they breathe in their hometown and the water in the aquifer under
their hometown. My guess is very few are thinking centuries ahead or thousand
of years ahead, but that’s what we have to do.
~ Pete
Seeger |  |
So
bleak is the picture... that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out
to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century.
~ Philip Shabecoff
| Reasonable
men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their
environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable
men.
-- George Bernard
Shaw | 
|
| |
*
"The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising
power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there
be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving
diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative."
~ Vandana
Shiva |
|
The
environmental movement is one of the most successful
social change movements. Popularizing Earth
Day celebrations can be credited with bringing
the movement to the mainstream. Through grassroots
efforts, festivals, fairs, assemblies and concerts
have helped popularize concern for our environment
in the public's mind. Since so many people participate
in Earth Day activities, Earth Day is the perfect
opportunity to get people to tap-into the better
world movement, so that they can find the inspiration
and encouragement to continue activities for
a more peaceful, just and sustainable world
all year long.
-- Robert Alan
Silverstein
|
 |
"America's
last wild places are everyone's good dream--our national commons--the enclaves
we set aside for solice and renewal."
~ Annick Smith
"Our
moral and ethical responsibility is to protect other
species in the spirit of husbandry rather than destroy
them in and attitude of conquest."
~ Charles Southwick
*
"The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground
water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost
of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically,
the economic incentive has been to pollute."
-- Gloria
Steinem | 
|
"Wildness
can be a way of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the
geography of hope."
~ Wallace Stenger
The
Truly Healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating."
~ William
H. Stewart
| 
| *
The Earth Charter is important as an expression of the commitment of people throughout
the Earth to evoke their own deepest moral, spiritual and ethical principles in
the task of ensuring a sustainable future for those who inhabit the Earth now
and those who will follow us on the Earth.
-- Maurice
Strong Nothing
less than the fate of the planet is at stake... No place on the planet can remain
an island of affluence in a sea of misery.
-- Maurice
Strong We're
either going to save the world or no one will be saved.
-- Maurice
Strong |
