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Quotes by Environmentalist

"I began working with the John Muir Institute and then started helping found Friends of the Earth organizations here and there in other countries. That pretty well brings us up to the present."

"In a thousand pounds of law there is not an ounce of love."


"Though many have tried, no one has ever yet explained away the decisive fact that science, which can do so much, cannot decide what it ought to do."

"The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place."


"Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without."

"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. It follows that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else."

"It's very hard for me to know what to say about fusion right now, inasmuch as it is not yet scientifically feasible. I just can't understand how so many people are able to predict so much about something that still isn't scientifically possible."

"Interestingly, the oil companies know very well that in less than 30 years they will not only be charging very high prices, but that they will be uncompetitive with renewables."

"Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom."

"Some tribes of birds will relieve and rear up the young and helpless, of their own and other tribes, when abandoned."

"That appropriation of resources and the transformation of them into goods and services through the European production system characterized, and characterizes to this day, all industrial systems including the information age."

"The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love."

"Industry is fortune's right hand, and frugality its left."

"Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem."

"Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany have detailed plans to cut their greenhouse emissions by 20 to 50 percent."

"Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution."

"A great deal of pressure was then built up to remove me from the club and my resignation was, finally, a forced one."

"In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease."

"Local companies don't have to internalize their costs, and few actually do, but they tend to more often because the owners live there and they have to show their face in town, and their kids play with other kids."

"I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do."

"A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero."


"Birds have wings; they're free; they can fly where they want when they want. They have the kind of mobility many people envy."

"Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration."

"Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent."

"My progress was rendered delightful by the sylvan elegance of the groves, chearful meadows, and high distant forests, which in grand order presented themselves to view."

"I think an old style of addressing environmental problems is ebbing, but the rise of the so-called conservative, political movement in this country is not a trend towards the future but a reaction to this very broad shift that we are undergoing."


"There is no such thing as a dangerous woman; there are only susceptible men."

"When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle."


"In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them."

"I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system."

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

"The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual."


"Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers."

"The power of imagination makes us infinite."


"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."


"I can recognize the calls of practically every bird in North America. There are some in Africa I don't know, though."

"Within 10 years it will be impossible to travel to the North Pole by dog team. There will be too much open water."

"Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it."


"Any euphemism ceases to be euphemistic after a time and the true meaning begins to show through. It's a losing game, but we keep on trying."

"Animal substance seems to be the first food of all birds, even the granivorous tribes."

"Algebra is the metaphysics of arithmetic."

"Intelligent policies will be largely self-regulating in the sense that the system of incentives and standards makes it absolutely ludicrous to not move towards clean, internalized systems of cost and production."

"What we are missing, utterly and completely, in this government is accountability."

"Yet another proposal would have us rocket the waste into the sun, but, as you're probably aware, about one in ten of our space shots doesn't quite make it out of the earth's gravitational field."

"The parental, and filial affections seem to be as ardent, their sensibility and attachment, as active and faithful, as those observed to be in human nature."

"Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor."

"For how many people do you think might yet stand on this planet before the sun grows cold? That's the responsibility we hold in our hands."
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