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"I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics."
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"The addition of certain chemicals to the atmosphere will destroy wavelengths of light and it may only be a matter of time before one of these wavelengths of light that is critical for human survival is eliminated. This is called: The Extinction Wavelength."

"We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh."

"By eating meat we share the responsibility of climate change, the destruction of our forests, and the poisoning of our air and water. The simple act of becoming a vegetarian will make a difference in the health of our planet."

"Whenever they are given the choice, some people choose a bath over a shower; they, too, would like to do their bit to waste water."

"The straw-coated floor crunched beneath her boots, a cool breeze sweeping in from where the roof had been ripped half off thanks to Sorrel's bull. To keep the wyverns from feeling less caged-and so Abraxos could watch the stars, as he liked to do."

"In a natural environment, nature controls the breeding cycles. In the man-made environment, abnormal environmental conditions control the unnatural breeding cycles."

"It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere."

"Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness."

"We need to consciously remember that we have an unprecedented responsibility to protect the planet, because without it we have nowhere else to live."

"The most exemplary nature is that of the topsoil. It is very Christ-like in its passivity and beneficence, and in the penetrating energy that issues out of its peaceableness. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter into it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory, but as richness, new possibility. Its fertility is always building up out of death into promise. Death is the bridge or the tunnel by which its past enters its future."
Explore more quotes by Michael Pollan

"It was the same industrial logic- protein is protein- that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading BSE [mad cow disease]."

"Tree planting is always a utopian enterprise, it seems to me, a wager on a future the planter doesn't necessarily expect to witness."

"Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share."

"Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever pause to consider the life of the pig-an animal easily as intelligent as a dog-that becomes the Christmas ham."

"In corn, I think I've found the key to the American food chain. If you look at a fast-food meal, a McDonald's meal, virtually all the carbon in it - and what we eat is mostly carbon - comes from corn."

"Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread."

"Wet milling (to produce starch) is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calorie of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned."
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