Environmental Quotes - Page 18

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?

My efforts in Congress are guided by the belief that environmental preservation and restoration are a critical part of the legacy we leave to future generations.

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbaninzation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

True wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in molding our conduct according to her laws and model.

My mom was an environmental activist in Australia in the late ’60s and ’70s and I guess I’ve inherited that awareness from her.

The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.

Surveying the available alternative energy sources for criteria such as energy density, environmental impacts, reliance on depleting raw materials, intermittency versus constancy of supply, and the percentage of energy returned on the energy invested in energy production, none currently appears capable of perpetuating this kind of society.

Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.

For every $1 advertisers spend advertising something healthful like apples, they spend $500 advertising junk food.

A recent review of different agricultural options for the future was conducted by a panel of experts. The scientists posed the question: How are we going to feed the world when there are nine billion people on it, as there will be by 2050? And the answer they came up with was industrial agriculture won't work and genetic engineering won't work and the solution is going to be sustainable, and going to ecological kinds of farming that are based on local environmental conditions that work with local ecosystems available to develop a richer kind of farming technology.

Fast food may appear to be cheap food and, in the literal sense it often is, but that is because huge social and environmental costs are being excluded from the calculations.

...when food is shared in a fair way, with solidarity, when no one is deprived, every community can meet the needs of the poorest. Human ecology and environmental ecology walk together.

Nourishment is a factor which touches on the fundamental right to life.

We do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for the world of nature because we do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for ourselves. It is because we cripple and mutilate ourselves that we cripple and mutilate everything else as well. Our contemporary crisis is really our own depravity writ large.

We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.

Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river, there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.

If you, as CEO, have recognized an approach as being the right one, you have to pursue it consistently, even if some people disagree. But it is now clear to everyone that we, as an automaker, have no alternative but to take [environmental protection] course.

...Environmental groups are too often alarmists. They have an awful track record, so they've lost credibility with the public.

Scientists like Bjorn Lomborg in The Skeptical Environmentalist have, in my opinion, properly nailed environmental extremists for these exaggerated scenarios.

America ships tons of sugar cookies to Denmark and Denmark ships tons of sugar cookies to America. Wouldn't it be more efficient just to swap recipes?

A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.

In our rich consumers' civilization we spin cocoons around ourselves and get possessed by our possessions.

The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

Sustainable South Bronx advocates for environmental justice through sustainable environmental and economic development projects.

Farmers...can no longer keep up with rising demand; thus the outlook is for chronic scarcities and rising prices.