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Quote by Joy Davidman

“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.”

Quote by Joy Davidman

Author

Joy Davidman
Joy Davidman

Joy Davidman, a British poet, was born on April 18, 1915, and passed away on July 13, 1960. Her poetry is known for its unique style and profound emotion, and is widely regarded as an important voice in 20th-century British literature. more

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“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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