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Quotes by Environmentalist
"I did a salad, but I didn't do a garden."
47
"Along the borders to Ethiopia and Somalia, anarchy reigns, the police and military have retreated quite some distance."
27
"We think that groups of between 30 and 40 early men would have settled in an area measuring a hundred square kilometers."
Men,
27
"One should not forget that there are very few surviving items from this period, often just single, small bones, a tooth, a sliver of the skull. Categorizing these pieces can be very difficult."
27
"It is virtually impossible to control Northern Kenya, which is populated chiefly by migrant nomads."
24
"Paleoanthropology is not a science that ends with the discovery of a bone. One has to have the original to work with. It is a life-long task."
23
"We are concerned that, in a few years time, this place of discovery, with its wealth of human fossils, the like of which can be found nowhere else in the world, could be completely destroyed."
23
"Whether or not all this came to pass in an East African ditch, I wouldn't like to say. Perhaps it happened in North Africa or further west, but Africa was definitely the place."
22
"Earlier, 100,000 elephants lived in Kenya and we didn't have any noteworthy problem with it. The problem that we have is not that there are now more elephants."
Now,
21
"Elephants can live to an age of up to 70 or 80 years and they have a good memory. It could be they come across an area that is experiencing a drought. Then they continue on their path and run into people."
20
"The elephants were being slaughtered in masses. Some were even killed in the vicinity of big tourist hotels."
20
"For fossils to thrive, certain favorable circumstances are required. First of all, of course, remnants of life have to be there. These then need to be washed over with water as soon as possible, so that the bones are covered with a layer of sediment."
20
"Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well."
19
"I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out."
19
"The land is not in the least bit fertile and yet the cattle herds grow larger and larger. A cow represents capital investment here."
19
"A number of scientists with greatly different backgrounds can come up with completely different assessments. The discussions or controversies are endless. Once a year, we try to bring the most important discoverers together to exchange their experiences and knowledge."
17
"We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man."
16
"I can't think of any other region in the world which is such a vast source of fossils."
16
"To investigate the history of man's development, the most important finds are, of course, hominid fossils."
15
"Sadly, I am not able to take part in the fieldwork myself so much anymore, as both of my legs were amputated following an airplane crash twelve years ago."
14
"The problem is that during the 1980s, a decade of heavy poaching, the elephants retreated to safer areas. And now people have moved into the corridors once used by the elephants."
14
"To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world."
6
"Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we'll soon be in trouble."
6
"The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected."
5
"Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm."
4
"Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them."
4
"Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left."
4
"Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is."
4
"The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort."
4
"I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra Club in '52, walked the plank there in '69, founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters after that."
3
"A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself."
3
"What a man knows is everywhere at war with what he wants."
3
"However, I think the major opposition to ecology has deeper roots than mere economics; ecology threatens widely held values so fundamental that they must be called religious."
3
"You may be able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere."
3
"Having contemplated this admirable grove, I proceeded towards the shrubberies on the banks of the river, and though it was now late in December, the aromatic groves appeared in full bloom."
3
"Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land."
3
"The poor monkey, quietly seated on the ground, seemed to be in sore trouble at this display of anger."
2
"Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time."
2
"Nothing is invented and perfected at the same time."
2
"We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital."
2
"We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly where, but I think it's back there at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment apart."
2
"If, as is natural, you focus on the corruption and on those threatened institutions that are trying to prevent change - even though they don't really know what they're trying to prevent - then you can get pessimistic."
2
"The people were simpler, more peaceable and friendly in their manners and dispositions; and assassinations, which give the southern provinces so ill a reputation, were almost unknown."
2
"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."
2
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