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Environment Quotes

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Environment Quotes

“We should not knowingly allow any species or race to go extinct. And let us go beyond mere salvage to begin the restoration of natural environments, in order to enlarge wild populations and stanch the hemorrhaging of biological wealth. There can be no purpose more enspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.”

“Students who are interested in learning about the environment should not be dissuaded from doing so, but only if they have proved their proficiency in other basic courses, such as U.S. history. Until then, we need to focus on producing well-educated citizens steeped in their country's history and mindful of their civic responsibilities.”

“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.”

“If having endured much, we at last asserted our 'right to know' and if, knowing, we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals, we should look around and see what other course is open to us.”

“We have come tardily to the tremendous task of cleaning up our environment. We should have moved with similar zeal at least a decade ago. But no purpose is served by post-mortems. With visionary zeal but the greatest realism, we must now address ourselves to the vast problems that confront us.”

“Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is - or should be - the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all - perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.”

“Canada regards herself as responsible to all mankind for the peculiar ecological balance that now exists so precariously in the water, ice and land areas of the Arctic archipelago. We do not doubt for a moment that the rest of the world would find us at fault, and hold us liable, should we fail to ensure adequate protection of that environment from pollution or artificial deterioration.”

“My books have done extremely well, I know. But I don't honestly feel much different from when I began to write. I still think we have a long way to go. I suppose my name means more in Nigeria today than it did five years ago. But I feel the job that literature should do in our community has not even started. It's not yet part of the life of the nation. We are still at the beginning. It's a big beginning, because now we are catching the next generation in the schools. When I was their age, I had nothing to read that had any relevance to my own environment.”

“Inevitably I came to associate any wine I met with a specific place and a particular slant of history. I learned to perceive more than could be deduced from an analysis of the physical elements in the glass. For me, an important part of the pleasure of wine is its reflection of the total environment that produced it. If I find in a wine no hint of where it was grown, no mark of the summer when the fruit ripened, and no indication of the usages common among those who made it, I am frustrated and disappointed. Because that is what a good, honest wine should offer.”

“Did the Pilgrims on the Mayflower sit around Plymouth Rock waiting for a return trip? They came here to settle. And that's what we should be doing on Mars. When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you're there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn't be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you're there.”

“You can't see any movie nowadays really without it having some sort of CGI treatment, albeit whether it's a creature or an environment, something like that. To make a point, sort of poetically in that case, but clearly it was a drama and how do you approach it? Well, I think what you're supposed to do is what the text dictates. What you bring to it and everything you need to know should be there, and pay attention to your director.”

“Even if the constants which economists wish to determine were less numerous, and the method of experiment more accessible, we should still be faced with the fact that the constants themselves are different at different times. The gravitation constant is the same always. But the economic constants-these elasticities of demand and supply-depending, as they do, upon human consciousness, are liable to vary. The constitution of the atom, as it were, and not merely its position, changes under the influence of environment.”

“Celebrity chefs are the leaders in the field of food, and we are the led. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism?”

“Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken, decisions aimed at strengthening that covenant between human beings and the environment, which should mirror the creative love of God, from whom we came and towards whom we are journeying.”

“... these are the two factors that lead to the destruction of our environment: money and time-or to say it another way, greed and haste. The question is, or seems to be, are we going to have an immediate profit and an immediate saving of time, or are we going to do what we really should do as God's children?”

“The nuclear peril is usually seen in isolation from the threats to other forms of life and their ecosystems, but in fact it should be seen at the very center of the ecological crisis, as the cloud-covered Everest of which the more immediate, visible kinds of harm to the environment are the mere foothills.”

“The crimes committed against the people of West Papua are some of the most shameful of the past years. The Western powers have much to answer for, and at the very least should use their ample means to bring about the withdrawal of the occupying Indonesian army and termination of the shameful exploitation of resources and destruction of the environment and the lives and societies of the people of West Papua, who have suffered far too much.”

“I come out of the environment of the Deep South, where I had seen the millstone of racial discrimination weighting down my people, both the black people and the white people; and I had seen the enormous progress that we were able to make after we removed the legal restraints of a two-class society, with the whites superior and blacks inferior. So I was very convinced before I became President that basic human rights, equality of opportunity, the end of abuse by governments of their people, was a basic principle on which the United States should be an acknowledged champion.”

“If you look into the way that materials are used in an ecological system you'll notice that you'll find that there is no waste. The waste of one organism becomes food for another and everything's recycled in an ecological system whereas in our human built environment there's a throughput system. We use something then we throw it away... We have to imitate nature and try to re-use everything we make as human beings or recycle them - when we cannot re-use or recycle them we should try to reintegrate them back into the natural environment.”

“I don't think there's any evidence to support that kind of criticism. I think that what we have attempted to do is to say that environmental concerns should certainly be addressed. We're not suggesting that any kind of development trample upon the existing laws that are there to insure that we maintain as high a quality of environment as possible.”

“Bolivia also depends not only on tin and other minerals, but also depends on the gas and oil. A rational extraction should be made, taking care of the environment. We should give added value to this natural resource, and generate revenue to fight poverty with more resources, that come from natural resources.”

“It is important to understand that there are two separate battles taking place in Iraq: there is the political rift between the Sunnis, Shia and the Kurds and there is a foreign extremist group - ISIS - trying to take advantage of the political environment through violence. If the Iraqis can resolve their political differences, it will be far more difficult for ISIS to thrive. Moving forward, we should continue to evaluate additional steps to help combat ISIS as we see what the Iraqis are willing to do politically, but we must also firmly guard against mission creep.”

“Above all, we should question the consumer ethic, which uses up non-renewable resources, creates inequality and injustice, generates pollution, destroys other species and upsets the balance of nature. The consumer ethic not only defiles the environment by creating undesirable change in the biosphere but also corrupts the mind and body by defining pleasure in terms of ownership and absorption. Waste itself is a human concept; everything in nature is eventually used. If human beings carry on in their present ways, they will one day be recycled along with the dinosaurs.”

“I think spiritual perception comes from natural and healthy relationship to the land and I've had that. I get an easy, automatic sense of myself in nature, a wholeness and I feel nowhere else. I think people should live where praying is most immediate. That`s why I live in New Mexico. The physical terrain, the feeling, the environment and culture improve my life just by waking up there.”

“Stanford may be the best university in the world, but you can get all the way through here without knowing where your food came from, without being able to say where we came from, without being able to give a coherent description of why the climate is changing and why we should be concerned about it. So I started teaching a course in human evolution and the environment that's open to all Stanford students, no prerequisites.”

“We don't have the Democrats doing a Fox News debate. They have decided they want to boycott Fox News, at least this election cycle. I don't see Hillary and Bernie Sanders doing a Fox News debate. And they should. We have great journalists on this network. I'm an opinion person. It wouldn't be me - that I think would do a great job. But if they're not going to put themselves in an environment like this, do you have to now reconsider, in other words, going forward, that maybe these liberal networks don't deserve the access to these candidates?”