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Quotes by Environmentalist
"A great deal of pressure was then built up to remove me from the club and my resignation was, finally, a forced one."
47
"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."
47
"The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual."
46
"Who knows but that England may revive in New South Wales when it has sunk in Europe."
46
"The European nations take climate change very seriously."
46
"I can recognize the calls of practically every bird in North America. There are some in Africa I don't know, though."
46
"The attention of a traveller, should be particularly turned, in the first place, to the various works of Nature, to mark the distinctions of the climates he may explore, and to offer such useful observations on the different productions as may occur."
46
"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."
46
"Some otherwise sane scientists have seriously proposed that we tuck this deadly garbage under the edges of drifting continents but how can they be sure the moving land masses will climb over the waste and not just push it forward?"
46
"We can no longer prosper by increasing human productivity. The more we try to do, the more poverty we will create."
46
"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."
45
"In an approximate way, the logic of commons has been understood for a long time, perhaps since the discovery of agriculture or the invention of private property in real estate."
45
"If we bestow but a very little attention to the economy of the animal creation, we shall find manifest examples of premeditation, perseverance, resolution, and consumate artifice, in order to effect their purpose."
45
"Once again I stopped listening to the news this week."
45
"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."
45
"Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed."
45
"It may be proper to observe, that I had now passed the utmost frontier of the white settlements on that border."
45
"Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom."
45
"Is the minor convenience of allowing the present generation the luxury of doubling its energy consumption every 10 years worth the major hazard of exposing the next 20,000 generations to this lethal waste?"
44
"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."
44
"We tried burying the waste at sea and the concrete cannisters that held it cracked open."
44
"The city and province were given up to anarchy; the coloured people, elated with victory, proclaimed the slaughter of all whites, except the English, French, and American residents."
44
"What we are missing, utterly and completely, in this government is accountability."
44
"Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution."
43
"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."
43
"Their elegant shape, showy colours, and slow, sailing mode of flight, make them very attractive objects, and their numbers are so great that they form quite a feature in the physiognomy of the forest, compensating for the scarcity of flowers."
43
"I believe that the average guy in the street will give up a great deal, if he really understands the cost of not giving it up. In fact, we may find that, while we're drastically cutting our energy consumption, we're actually raising our standard of living."
43
"One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of March thaw, is the Spring."
43
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."
43
"The power of imagination makes us infinite."
43
"Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place."
43
"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."
42
"Happiness is itself a kind of gratitude."
42
"What happens when the guy who runs the reactor gets out of bed wrong or decides, for some reason, that he wants to override his instruction sheet some afternoon?"
42
"We are at the edge of an abyss and we're close to being irrevocably lost."
42
"Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional form and ceremonies."
41
"Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time."
41
"All I know about thermal pollution is that if we continue our present rate of growth in electrical energy consumption it will simply take, by the year 2000, all our freshwater streams to cool the generators and reactors."
41
"In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease."
41
"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."
41
"The risk presented by these lethal wastes is like no other risk, and we should not be expected to accept it or to project it into the future in order for manufacturers and utilities to make a dollar killing now."
41
"If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either."
41
"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."
41
"The grand jury's job is not to weigh the evidence from both sides; it is only to decide whether there is enough evidence on one side to bring a person to trial."
41
"Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons."
41
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