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Quotes by Environmentalist
"Some tribes of birds will relieve and rear up the young and helpless, of their own and other tribes, when abandoned."
12
"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."
12
"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."
11
"But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights."
11
"In a finite world this means that the per capita share of the world's goods must steadily decrease."
11
"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."
11
"Besides alligators, the only animals to be feared are the poisonous serpents. These are certainly common enough in the forest, but no fatal accident happened during the whole time of my residence."
11
"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."
11
"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."
11
"If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either."
11
"When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle."
11
"The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only."
11
"The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them."
Man,
11
"A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality."
11
"The financial capital is being concentrated by corporations, institutional investors, and even our pension funds, and being reinvested in companies that repeat this process because it provides the highest return on that financial capital."
11
"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."
11
"Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?"
11
"A coldly rationalist individualist can deny that he has any obligation to make sacrifices for the future."
11
"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."
11
"Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place."
11
"The optimum population is, then, less than the maximum."
11
"Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient."
11
"If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed."
10
"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."
10
"Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming."
10
"I see humanity now as one vast plant, needing for its highest fulfillment only love, the natural blessings of the great outdoors, and intelligent crossing and selection."
10
"We are losing our living systems, social systems, cultural systems, governing systems, stability, and our constitutional health, and we're surrendering it all at the same time."
10
"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."
10
"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?"
10
"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."
10
"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."
10
"It is a mistake to think that we can control the breeding of mankind in the long run by an appeal to conscience."
10
"Recreational development is a job not of building roads into the lovely country, but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind."
10
"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."
10
"But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere."
10
"It may be proper to observe, that I had now passed the utmost frontier of the white settlements on that border."
10
"Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom."
10
"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?"
9
"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."
9
"There is no such thing as a dangerous woman; there are only susceptible men."
9
"Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies."
9
"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."
9
"We are at the edge of an abyss and we're close to being irrevocably lost."
9
"They simply don't know that much about what they're doing. There isn't enough control. There isn't enough capability in ordinary people to tinker with such a complicated piece of machinery."
9
"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."
9
"Science is knowledge arranged and classified according to truth, facts, and the general laws of nature."
9
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