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Quote by Lester R. Brown

“Another agricultural trend of growing concern is the increased nutrient content of coastal waters resulting from fertilizer runoff in agricultural regions. Augmented by urban sewage discharge in some situations, this results in huge algal blooms, which, as they die and decay, deplete the oxygen content in the water, leading to the death of the fish.”

Quote by Lester R. Brown

Book:Vital Signs 1999-2000: The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future

Work

Vital Signs 1999-2000: The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future

Vital Signs 1999-2000 is a comprehensive report that examines various environmental indicators and their implications for global sustainability. It includes data and analysis on climate change, biodiversity, and other critical environmental concerns. more

Author

Lester R. Brown

Lester R. Brown, born on March 28, 1934, is a renowned environmentalist and sustainable development advocate. He is a prominent environmental policy analyst and has dedicated his career to studying global environmental issues and proposing solutions. more

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“Each summer, for example, nitrogen and phosphate washing from farmlands in the Mississippi Valley enter the Gulf of Mexico, creating a massive algal bloom covering some 16,000 square kilometers. As the blooms die off, this area-roughly the size of New Jersey-is so deprived of oxygen that no fish survive.”

Source: Vital Signs 1999-2000: The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future

“Anyone who studies our poisonous drugs, our denatured food, our deathtrap automobiles and houses, our lung-rotting cities, must concede that we accept a good deal of murder as inevitable simply because it is done to make or save money.”

Done House Deals Cities Accepting Study Drug Murder Environmental Inevitable Pollution Lungs Automobile Saving Money Poisonous Rotting

Author:Joy Davidman

“As currently written, the laws require certain manufacturers and users of such chemicals to report any and all environmental releases-either accidental or routine-to air, water, or soil. The Toxics Release Inventory is the main registry of such events, and it is available to the public through the Environmental Protection Agency. It is hardly comprehensive. Toxic emissions reported to the federal government are thought to account for only 5 percent of all chemical releases.”

“It is essential that we take steps to prevent chemical substances from becoming environmental hazards. Unless we develop better methods to assure adequate testing of chemicals, we will be inviting the environmental crisis of the future.”

Steps Becoming Essentials Crisis Method Environmental Substance Chemicals Pollution Testing Adequate Hazards Inviting Environmental Crisis

Book:Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1971

Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1971

“Brothers and Sisters: Our ancient homeland is spotted today with an array of chemical dumps. Along the Niagara River, dioxin, a particularly deadly substance, threatens the remaining life there and in the waters which flow from there. Forestry departments spray the surviving forests with powerful insecticides to encourage tourism by people seeking a few days or weeks away from the cities where the air hangs heavy with sulphur and carbon oxides.”

“The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures.”

Source: All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life

“Indeed, the quantity of PCBs still in use plus the quantity still languishing in waste dumps exceeds the total amount that has already escaped into the general environment. Without a program to recall and contain them, semivolatile PCBs will continue to insinuate themselves into the food chain for decades.”

Stills Use Environment Amount Waste Program Environmental Decades Chains Plus Quantity Pollution Recalls Exceed Dump Food Chain

Book:Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood

Source: Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood

“By 1990, the EPA had tallied up 32,645 sites of past chemical waste dumping in need of cleanup. Some of these are actual waste landfills, but many are former manufacturing sites where drums full of chemicals have been simply abandoned. The names of the most notorious appear on the EPS's National Priorities List. These are the so-called Superfund sites, names for the super fund of money put together by Congress in 1980 to clean them up. In 2009, the Superfund list contained 1,331 sites.”

Source: Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment

“Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.”

Men Speak Worship Environmental Pollution Ecological Devastation

Author:Ernest Becker

“God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation. Commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it... They are environmentalists. Being deeply connected with their environment is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God has made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence. This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues.”

People Made Use Would Be Care Spiritual Order Existence Responsibility Issues Environment Middle Creation Divine Environmental Deny Connected Core Manage Pollution Loaded Environmentalist

Author:Rob Bell