ENVIRONMENTAL QUOTES

"For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root."

— Henry David Thoreau

"Let every individual and institution now think and act as a responsible trustee of Earth, seeking choices in ecology, economics and ethics that will provide a sustainable future, eliminate pollution, poverty and violence, awaken the wonder of life and foster peaceful progress in the human adventure."

— John McConnell, founder of International Earth Day

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

— Mahatma Gandhi

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

— Edmund Burke

"It's a job that's never started that takes the longest to finish."

— J.R.R. Tolkien

"We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles."

— Jimmy Carter

"For what is the hope of the hypocrite, though he hath gained, when God taketh away his soul?"

— Job 27:8

"The superior man seeks what is right; the inferior one, what is profitable."

— Confucius

"To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, that is to have succeeded."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Peasant people ... don't have a chance to share in the riches that the planet can offer because some people are taking off so much of the pleasures of this world, and there's only so much to go around."

— Sister Dorothy Stang, an eco-activist nun from Dayton, Ohio, who in 2005 was murdered in the Brazilian Amazon

"The ultimate test of man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard."

— Gaylord Nelson
former governor of Wisconsin, co-founder of Earth Day

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good action; try to use ordinary situations."

— Jean Paul Richter, German Romantic novelist and humorist

"Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing."

— Thomas Jefferson

"Your descendants shall gather your fruits."

— Virgil

"A person writing at night may put out the lamp, but the words he has written will remain. It is the same with the destiny we create for ourselves in this world."

— Shakyamuni

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""Ol' MacDonald had a farm—until America's corporate animal factories plowed it under...""

— Deirdre Imus

"Industrialized, chemical-intensive agriculture and our globalized system of distributing food and fiber are literally destroying the earth, driving two billion farmers off the land, and producing a product which is increasingly contaminated. That's why the wave of the future is organic and sustainable, not GMO."

— Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association

"I believe that the great Creator has put ores and oil on this earth to give us a breathing spell. As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which is God's true storehouse and can never be exhausted. We can learn to synthesize material for every human need from things that grow."

— George Washington Carver

"Farmers are the only indispensable people on the face of the earth."

— Li Zhaoxing, Ambassador, China

"The diligent farmer plants trees, of which he himself will never see the fruit."

— Cicero

"Cows were made to eat grass.... The two biggest things that harm a cow are grain and concrete. By kicking the cows outside and letting them be on the sod and letting them eat the grass, you can get rid of about 90% of your cow problems."

— Kevin Sullivan, dairy farmer

"The correlation between poverty and obesity can be traced to agricultural policies and subsidies."

— Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma

"Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply a broad-spectrum insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect ... without also killing the 'good' insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down organic matter [and maintaining healthy soil]?

— Rachel Carson, author, Silent Spring

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"The American people have a right to air that they and their children can breathe without fear."

— Lyndon Baines Johnson

"In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day."

— Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.:  Mobilizing to Save Civilization

"Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you."

— John Muir

"All of us face a variety of risks to our health as we go about our day-to-day lives.... Indoor air pollution is one risk that you can do something about."

— US EPA

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"We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words."

— Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty

"Animals raised on factory farms are routinely mutilated, including removing beaks from poultry, and clipping pigs' tails and teeth, because the animals become very aggressive from the stress of close confinement and they attack each other. Cows' tails are also removed to make milking easier. These practices have been shown to cause lasting pain."

— Sustainable Table

"An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics and related drugs produced in this country are used for nontherapeutic purposes such as accelerating animal growth and compensating for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on 'factory farms.' This translates to ... almost eight times the amount given to humans to treat disease."

— Union of Concerned Scientists

"I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was 'Feed my sheep,' not 'Try experiments on my rats,' or even 'Teach my performing dogs new tricks.'"

— C.S. Lewis

"The animals of the planet are in desperate peril... Without free animal life I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen."

— Alice Walker

"I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit."

— Shakespeare, (Sir Andrew Aguecheek, in Twelfth Night)

"We consider ourselves a nation of animal lovers, but by far the moment that we are with animals the most is when they are on our plates and we are about to eat them."

— William Rivas-Rivas, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

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"We—human beings—are part of 'biodiversity.' We are dependent on the whole food chain down below us."

— Darrell Merrell, heirloom vegetable farmer

"We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth's functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and geocide, the devastation of the earth itself."

— Father Thomas Berry

"Each one [of the Earth's 5 million invertebrate species] plays a role in its ecosystem. It's like we're tearing the cogs out of a great machine. The machine might work after you tear out ten cogs, but what happens when you tear out a hundred?"

— Scott Black, Xerces Society, quoted in Sierra

"A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy."

— John Sawhill, former president/CEO of The Nature Conservancy

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"As crude a weapon as a cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life."

— Rachel Carson

"We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals we disseminate widely in our environment?"

— Rachel Carson, author, Silent Spring

"One in six Americans lives within a mile of a major toxic waste site."

— Phil Clapp, president, National Environmental Trust

"For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future... Yet genetic deterioration through man-made agents is the menace of our time..."

— Rachel Carson, author, Silent Spring

"Men are naturally most impressed by diseases which have obvious manifestations, yet some of their worst enemies creep on them unobtrusively."

— Dr. René Dubos, as quoted by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring

"There are thousands of different chemicals in the environment that may cause adverse human health effects. Little is known about the toxicological properties of most of these chemicals..."

— US EPA, "Unfinished Business: A Comparative Assessment of Environmental Problems" [1987]

"Despite progress, lead poisoning remains one of the top childhood environmental health problems today. Without further action, over the coming decades large numbers of young children may be exposed to lead in amounts that could impair their ability to learn and to reach their full potential."

— President's Task Force on Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks to Children [2000]

"Children between ages one and three are at the greatest risk [of lead poisoning] because of normal hand-to-mouth activity and the increase in mobility during their second and third years, which make lead hazards more accessible to them."

— President's Task Force on Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks to Children [2000]

"The National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society focus most of their resources on research and treatment rather than on cancer prevention. By talking as if the cure is around the corner and their "war on cancer" is being won, when certain cancer rates—notably breast cancer and lung cancer among women and malignant melanoma—are on the rise, they divert attention from strict regulation of industry and minimizing people's exposure to carcinogens."

— H. Patricia Hynes, "The Recurring Silent Spring" [1989]

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"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

— Abraham Lincoln [1864]

Only when the last tree has been cut down,
Only when the last river has been poisoned,
Only when the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

— Cree Indian Prophecy

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

— Richard Feynman, US educator and physicist

"Those who develop the technologies, who promote them and stand to profit most from them, are not those who suffer their risks. The analysis of technologies is biased toward their use because the technology promoters generally lack the expertise and the incentive to analyze the risks of the technologies for human health and the environment."

— H. Patricia Hynes, "The Recurring Silent Spring" [1989]

"[Because] corporations must have physically impossible 'endless growth' in order to survive, corporate social responsibility is a myth. The only socially responsible act that corporations can take is to dissolve."

— Adam D. Sacks

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"In the long term, economic sustainability depends on ecological sustainability."

— “America’s Living Oceans”  [Pew Oceans Report, 2003]

"If the physical scientists who warn about limits to growth are right, confronting the global economic meltdown implies far more than merely getting the banks and mortgage lenders back on their feet. Indeed, in that case we face a fundamental change in our economy as significant as the advent of the industrial revolution. We are at a historic inflection point—the ending of decades of expansion and the beginning of an inevitable period of contraction that will continue until humanity is once again living within the limits of Earth's regenerative systems. But there are few signs that policy makers understand any of this. Their thinking appears to be shaped primarily by mainstream economists' assurances that growth can and must continue into the indefinite future, and that the economic contraction the world is currently experiencing is only temporary—a problem that can and must be solved."

— Richard Heinberg

"Good house keeping practices in industries can reduce 30% of waste and thereby 30% of the cost of waste management."

— Sumith Pilapitiya

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell."

— Edward Abbey

"We're captives of a business model that has passed its useful limits. [But] until there's a fundamental change in the underlying rules set, the model will keep yielding the same output."

— George Ure, author of Urban Survival

"The grassroots movement for locally produced goods and independently owned businesses now sweeping the country is having a measurable impact on the choices people make."

— Stacy Mitchell, from her IndyWeek article
The Dirty Tricks Behind Local-Washing

"The financial system as a whole has had the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme if we look at it fundamentally."

— Tim Lee, economic consultant

"The need for tax shifting—lowering income taxes while raising taxes on environmentally destructive activities—in order to get the market to tell the truth has been widely endorsed by economists.... The Economist [magazine] has recognized the advantage of environmental tax shifting and endorses it strongly: 'On environmental grounds, never mind energy security, America taxes gasoline too lightly. Better than a one-off increase, a politically more feasible idea, and desirable in its own terms, would be a long-term plan to shift taxes from incomes to emissions of carbon.' "

— Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.:  Mobilizing to Save Civilization

"Every good cause is worth some inefficiency."

— Paul Samuelson, economist

"Man is not like other animals in the ways that are really significant: Animals have instincts, we have taxes."

— Erving Goffman

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"Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."

— Malcolm Forbes

"Nature has been for me, as long as I remember, a source of solace, inspiration, adventure, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion."

— Lorraine Anderson

"If you want one year of prosperity, plant corn.
If you want ten years of prosperity, plant trees.
If you want one hundred years of prosperity, educate people."

— Chinese proverb

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"Not only will atomic power be released, but someday we will harness the rise and fall of the tides and imprison the rays of the sun."

— Thomas Edison

"We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before."

— Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.:  Mobilizing to Save Civilization

"When plants die, they're recycled into basic elements [by the biota in the soil] and become a part of new plants. It's a closed cycle. There is no bio-waste."

— Alice Friedemann, from the article, Peak Soil: Why Cellulosic Ethanol, Biofuels Are Unsustainable and a Threat to America

"First, there is the power of the Wind, constantly exerted over the globe.... Here is an almost incalculable power at our disposal, yet how trifling the use we make of it! It only serves to turn a few mills, blow a few vessels across the ocean, and a few trivial ends besides. What a poor compliment do we pay to our indefatigable and energetic servant!"

— Henry David Thoreau, from Paradise (To Be) Regained [1843]

"The US economy, because it's so energy wasteful, is much less efficient than either the European or Japanese economies. It takes us twice as much energy to produce a unit of GDP as it does in Europe and Japan. So, we're fundamentally less efficient and therefore less competitive, and the sooner we being to tighten up, the better it will be for our economy and society."

— Hazel Henderson, on ENN Radio

"The amount of electricity that has been saved [by adopting refrigerator efficiency rules in the US]—in spite of Vice President Cheney saying that efficiency is [only] a moral virtue ... and that you need [increased] supply like ANWR—is two ANWRs worth of energy."

— Stephen Schneider, Stanford University climatologist, advisor to Governor Schwarzenegger on greenhouse emissions

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"We wanted albacore on the list of fish not to eat. We knew that wouldn't happen because of the pressure from the industry, but we certainly didn't think there should be a recommendation to eat [as much as] six ounces of albacore."

— Vas Aposhian, University of Arizona toxicologist, upon resigning in protest from the mercury-in-fish advisory panel, 2004

"Salmon farming—the placement of large metal or mesh net cages in the ocean to grow fish—was pioneered in Norway in the 1960s. Since then, the industry has expanded to Scotland, Ireland, Canada, the US, and Chile, but is dominated by the same multinational corporations. Wherever it is practiced, net-cage salmon farming is controversial and raises serious environmental concerns."

— David Suzuki Foundation

"The small fisherman ... is the one that is suffering. It's the large corporations and their big draggers and trawlers and long-liners that are destroying the oceans. We hear all this talk that it's the conservationists that are putting the poor fishermen out of work, but what we never hear about is, for example, that the Norwegian drag-trawler fleet went down the coast of India and took everything, and as a result, one million Indian fishermen are out of work and those fishing communities are totally devastated. That's not a story you see in the New York Times... The biggest loss of [fishing] jobs is from these corporations and heavy-gear technologies, which are destroying the fish."

— Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd Society

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"Food is power. Are you in control of yours?"

— John Jeavons

"In promoting this food radiation policy, the FDA has accomplished what all the terrorists in the world could not: The mass irradiation of the US food supply."

— Mike Adams, Natural News

"Personally, I would drink hot cocoa in the morning, green tea in the afternoon, and a glass of red wine in the evening. That's a good combination."

— Chang Y. Lee, Cornell University food scientist on how to get a diverse array of antioxidants from your beverages

"Food is our common ground, a universal experience."

— James Beard

"Go to the farmers' market and buy food there. You'll get something that's delicious. It's discouraging that this seems like such an elitist thing. It's not. It's just that we have to pay the real cost of food. People have to understand that cheap food has been subsidized. We have to realize that it's important to pay farmers up front, because they are taking care of the land."

— Alice Waters

"Those concerned with the fight against disease know that our bodies are designed to overcome disease processes before they become established. Our systems are readily disrupted by toxins and an absence of sufficient quantities of nutrients."

— Nutritional Cancer Therapy Trust

"The burden of food-related ill health measured in terms of mortality and morbidity is similar to that attributable to smoking.... The vast majority of the burden is attributable to unhealthy diets rather than to food-borne diseases."

— Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health

"One's stomach is one's internal environment."

— Samuel Butler

"True, nuts are high in fat, but most of them contain monounsaturated fat that is good for the heart. In fact, eaten in moderation, nuts can lower your risk of heart disease and heart attack."

— Dr. Andrew Weil

"If you think humans are meat-eaters then try eating the animal raw like every other meat-eater on the planet. If something is not palatable in its raw state then you probably shouldn't be eating it."

— David Wolfe, author, Nature's First Law: The Raw-Food Diet

"Eating is an environmental act."

— Alice Waters

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"You hear headlines from time to time about the Amazon [rainforest] disappearing at a greater or lesser rate.... The real story is that over time the rate has stayed just the same. Year after year, decade after decade, we have failed to stop—or really even decrease—deforestation."

— Patrick Symmes, Outside Magazine, interviewed on Living on Earth

"In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. Stopping the loggers is the fastest and cheapest solution to climate change."

— Daniel Howden, writing in The Independent

"A woodland in full color is awesome as a forest fire, in magnitude at least, but a single tree is like a dancing tongue of flame to warm the heart."

— Hal Borland

"It was strangely like war. They attacked the forest as if it were an enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken into patches, and wiped out. Many operators thought they were not only making lumber but liberating the land from the trees..."

— Murray Morgan, from the book The Last Wilderness

"A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people."

— Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a songbird will come."

— Chinese proverb

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"There is always music amongst the trees in the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it."

— Minnie Aumonier

"For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!"

— Edward Abbey

"I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs."

— Joseph Addison, 17th-century poet

"To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves."

— Mahatma Gandhi

"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I don't like formal gardens. I like wild nature. It's just the wilderness instinct in me, I guess."

— Walt Disney

"The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture."

— Bill Mollison, quoted in Gardening for the Future of The Earth

"The lunatic is on the grass..."

— Pink Floyd

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"Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our Earth—erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world's mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption."

— Pope Benedict, from a 2008 speech

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. "

— Chief Seattle

"Among the environmental trends undermining our future are shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, disappearing species, and rising temperatures. The temperature increases bring crop-withering heat waves, more-destructive storms, more-intense droughts, more forest fires, and, of course, ice melting. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize."

— Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.:  Mobilizing to Save Civilization

"Our choices at all levels—individual, community, corporate and government—affect nature. And they affect us."

— David Suzuki, Suzuki Foundation

"Considering the whole span of earthly time... Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species – man – acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world."

— Rachel Carson, author, Silent Spring

"We are monumentally distracted by a pervasive technological culture that appears to have a life of its own, one that insists on our full attention, continually seducing us and pulling us away from the opportunity to experience directly the true meaning of our own lives."

— Al Gore

"He reflected on the decay of mankind—the decline of the human race into folly and weakness and rottenness. 'Be a good animal, true to your animal instinct' was his motto."

— D.H. Lawrence, from the book The White Peacock

"Space travel has given us a new appreciation for the Earth. We realize that the Earth is special. We've seen it from afar. We realize that the Earth is the only natural home for man we know of, and that we had better protect it."

— James Erwin, US astronaut

"The consensus is that the threat to our health and security comes [not from natural resource depletion but rather] from the byproducts of production and consumption of non-renewable resources."

— Stephen D'Esposito, president, Earthworks/Mineral Policy Center

"Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life."

— Dr. René Dubos, quoted in "Life" [1970]"

"The fundamental principles of ecology govern our lives wherever we live, and ... we must wake up to this fact or be lost."

— Karin Sheldon, environmental lawyer [1973]

"Only when I saw the Earth from space, in all its ineffable beauty and fragility, did I realize that humankind's most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations."

— Sigmund Jahn, German cosmonaut

"True wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in molding our conduct according to her laws and model."

— Seneca, ancient Roman writer

"Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves."

— Rachel Carson, author, Silent Spring

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."

— Mahatma Gandhi

"That's human nature. Nobody does anything until it's too late."

— Michael Crichton, from the novel Prey

"I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?"

— Robert Redford , actor, at Yosemite National Park dedication, 1985

"What we do today, right now, will have an accumulated effect on all of our tomorrows."

— Alexandra Stoddard , author, interior designer and philosopher of contemporary living

"Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves."

— Jonas Salk , American physician and microbiologist, 1914-95

"Cleaning anything involves making something else dirty, but anything can get dirty without something else getting clean."

— Laurence J. Peter

"The key is to live simply."

— Ed Begley, Jr.

"We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature—trees, flowers, grass—grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls."

— Mother Teresa

"Desire is irrelevant. I am a machine."

— T-101/Arnold, from the movie Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

"The good Earth—we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."

— Kurt Vonnegut, from the book A Man Without a Country

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"Human activities are increasingly altering the Earth's climate.... It is virtually certain that increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will cause global surface climate to be warmer. The unprecedented increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, together with other human influences on climate over the past century and those anticipated for the future, constitute a real basis for concern."

— American Geophysical Union

"We know the science, we see the threat, and we know the time for action is now."

— Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California

"Despite the uncertainties…there is adequate evidence from observations and interpretations of climate simulations to conclude that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies, on economies, on ecosystems, and on wildlife through the 21st century and beyond."

— American Meteorological Society,

"It's very important to understand that climate change is not just another issue in this complicated world of proliferating issues. Climate change is THE issue which, unchecked, will swamp all other issues."

— Ross Gelbspan, author of Boiling Point

"Climate change is and will be a significant threat to our national security and in a larger sense to life on earth as we know it to be."

— Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, retired , former U.S. Army chief of staff

"In a way, global climate change is for the birds. On one side of the aviary, we have Chicken Little, telling us the sky is falling; on the other side, the ostrich, his head deep in the sand. Scientists have concluded that the ostrich is in denial: Significant climate change is occurring..."

— Consumer Reports [September 2003]

"Nuclear power as a solution to global warming is theoretically possible, but the proliferation problems and accident risks it would create would, I think, be intolerable because you have to build an immense number of nuclear power plants, one large plant a week around the world for the next 40 years, to make a significant dent in the global warming problem."

— Arjun Makhijani, president, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research as heard on Living on Earth

"Anyone who would substitute plutonium for carbon is an idiot."

— David Freeman, on nuclear power as a solution for global warming

"Climate change is for real. We have just a small window of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to lose."

— Dr. Rajendra Pachauri

"The good news is we know what to do. The good news is, we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming. We have all the technologies we need; more are being developed. And as they become available and become more affordable when produced in scale, they will make it easier to respond. But we should not wait, we cannot wait, we must not wait."

— Al Gore

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"The economic expansion that began in 2001, while it has been great for corporate profits, has yet to produce any significant gains for ordinary working Americans. And now it looks as if it never will."

— Paul Krugman, in his essay "The Sum of Some Fears"

"Our task is not to make societies safe for globalization, but to make the global system safe for decent societies."

— John J. Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO

"Globalization presumes sustained economic growth. Otherwise, the process loses its economic benefits and political support."

— Paul Samuelson, economist

"In today's integrated world economy, ... eradicating poverty may contribute as much to U.S. security as eradicating terrorism."

— Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.:  Mobilizing to Save Civilization

"It's still popular to ... insist that globalization is a rising tide that lifts all boats, but the hard reality is that the last thirty years have seen America's once proud and prosperous working class thrown to the wolves, so corporations could keep boosting their quarterly profits and the middle class could maintain a filmy illusion of wealth through access to cheap consumer goods."

— John Michael Greer, from the essay, A Failure of Mimesis

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"The haphazard and negligent agency regulation of biotechnology has been a disaster for consumers and the environment. Unsuspecting consumers by the tens of millions are being allowed to purchase and consume unlabeled genetically engineered foods, despite a finding by FDA scientists that these foods could pose serious risks."

— Center for Food Safety

"How do commercial interests usually protect themselves from liability claims? Through insurance. In fact, in our society, the litmus test for safety is insurance. You can be insured for almost anything if you pay enough for the premium, but if the insurance industry isn't willing to bet its money on the safety of [biotechnology], it means the risks are simply too high or too uncertain for them to take the gamble."

— David Suzuki, cited by John Robbins in "The Food Revolution - Genetic Engineering, Part I"

"US academic institutions are being 'bought' (via funding) by biotechnology firms which exert a vice-like grip on the US government."

— Ignacio Chapela, plant geneticist, in an interview
with the UK Guardian

Audacious at trying out everything, men rush
Headlong into the things that have been forbidden.

— Virgil

"I think that the 10-year experiment with genetically engineered foods and genetically engineered animals and drugs is nearly over. We're going to look back at a certain point and say, 'Oh my god, we wasted an entire decade fighting about this when the debate should have been about chemical-intensive agriculture vs. organic agriculture.'"

— Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association, commenting on Monstanto's decision not to release its GM wheat due to consumer and farmer resistance

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"To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them."

— Theodore Roosevelt

"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught."

— Baba Dioum, Senegalese conservationist

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"Just as there may be a time lag between [pollution] emissions and exposure, there may also be a time lag between exposure and [human or ecological] damages."

— US EPA, "Unfinished Business: A Comparative Assessment of Environmental Problems"

"When the earth is sick and polluted, human health is impossible.... To heal ourselves we must heal our planet, and to heal our planet we must heal ourselves."

— Bobby McLeod (Koori activist, aboriginal)

"Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits."

— Thomas Jefferson

People are like stained-glass windows.
They sparkle and shine when the sun is out,
But when the darkness sets in,
Their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

— Elizabeth Kübler-Ross

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"Air fresheners turn out to be among the most toxic products in our homes.... Even air fresheners labeled "natural" contain harmful ingredients. "Natural" is a term without any standards behind it."

— Alice Shabecoff, author of Poisoned for Profit

"Toxic chemicals in the home can be eliminated simply by making thoughtful choices in the supermarket after educating oneself about where the hazards are in common consumer products."

— Gary A. Davis and Em Turner,
"Safe Substitutes at Home: Non-toxic Household Products"

"The best way to realize the pleasure of feeling rich is to live in a smaller house than your means would entitle you to have."

— Edward Clarke

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"Mining is like a search-and-destroy mission."

— Stewart L. Udall

"I do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many."

— President Theodore Roosevelt

"We shall never understand the natural environment until we see it as a living organism. Land can be healthy or sick, fertile or barren, rich or poor, lovingly nurtured or bled white. Our present attitudes and laws governing the ownership and use of land represent an abuse of the concept of private property.... Today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see and nobody calls the cops."

— Paul Brooks

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"To be whole and harmonious, man must also know the music of the beaches and the woods. He must find the thing of which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it, if he is to live."

— William O. Douglas

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

— John Muir, from My First Summer in the Sierra

"There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm."

— Theodore Roosevelt

"Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling."

— Walt Whitman

"If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur, then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human."

— Thomas Berry

"It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever."

— Jimmy Carter

"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."

— John Muir

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"The oceans are in trouble; the coasts are in trouble; our marine resources are in trouble. These are not challenges we can sweep aside."

— James Watkins, Admiral, US Navy (Ret.);
head of US Commission on Ocean Policy

"However fragmented the world, however intense the national rivalries, it is an inexorable fact that we become more interdependent every day. I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence. The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat."

— Jacques Cousteau, quoted in "National Geographic" [1981]

"About half of the nation's waters surveyed by states do not adequately support aquatic life because of excess nutrients... Nutrients have also been associated with both the large hypoxia zone in the gulf of Mexico ... and the Pfisteria-induced fish kills and human health problems in the coastal waters of several East Coast and Gulf states."

— EPA Draft Report on the Environment [2003]

"I never was on the dull, tame shore, But I loved the great sea more and more."

— Barry Cornwall, from "The Sea"

"To me, the sea is like a person—like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there."

— Gertrude Ederle

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"When you look at an apple, some people would say the non-organic apple is cheaper than the organic apple. But when you factor in what you're receiving in terms of vitamins, minerals, etc., the organic apple—on that basis—is cheaper than the non-organic apple."

— Jerry Kay, on Beyond Organic

"There are 70 pesticides that are listed as known or probable carcinogens, based on animal testing. Of those 70, 44 are in use today, and 23 are used on our food."

— Gina Solomon, specialist in internal medicine [2001]

"People are applying the precautionary principle to their own lives by purchasing food that has not been produced by industrial methods. From the simple stance of hazard avoidance, organically produced food is the best option that we have."

— Dr. Vyvyan Howard,
toxico-pathologist at the University of Liverpool, UK

"Now that I've got kids, it's become really important for me on the health front to try to buy as much organic produce as possible."

— Jamie Oliver, UK celebrity chef, in BBC Good Food magazine

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"If ... we have concluded that we are being asked to take senseless and frightening risks, then we should no longer accept the counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals; we should look about and see what other course is open to us."

— Rachel Carson, author, Silent Spring

"Exposure to some pesticides during infancy, even at very low levels, can lead to serious life-long consequences if the pesticides disrupt hormone-driven developmental processes."

— Charles M. Benbrook

"The body of evidence in scientific literature shows that pesticide exposure can adversely affect a child's neurological, respiratory, immune, and endocrine system, even at low levels. Several pesticides, such as pyrethrins and pyrethroids, organophosphates and carbamates, are also known to cause or exacerbate asthma symptoms."

— Beyond Pesticides

"Until we have a more complete understanding of pesticide toxicity, the benefit of the doubt should be awarded to protecting the environment, the worker, and the consumer—this precautionary approach is necessary because the data on risk to human health from exposure to pesticides are incomplete."

— British Medical Association

"We've found that frogs are counting the number of chemicals in the water. If you expose them to two chemicals, there's a slight delay in metamorphosis; if you expose them to ten, there's even more of a delay. No single compound will do this."

— Tyrone Hayes, biologist, quoted in Sierra

"The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life."

— Rachel Carson, author, Silent Spring

"Each Valentine's day, when US and other consumers purchase millions of flowers for their loved ones and deeply inhale the fresh aroma of roses and carnations, they rarely think about where the flowers come from or how they are produced. Yet, if these same people knew more about the high levels of agrochemicals used in flower production and the often less-than-rosy labor conditions under which flowers are produced, they might think twice about sinking their noses into the petals to smell the perfume."

— Environmental Health Perspectives
[Volume 110, Number 5, May 2002]

"Insect populations ... possess considerable genetic diversity and a great potential for adaptation to different or changing environments. This makes them an especially formidable pest of crops, able to adapt to new plant varieties as they are developed or rapidly become resistant to insecticides."

— M.P. Hoffmann, A.C. Frodsham
"Natural Enemies of Vegetable Insect Pests" [1993]

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"How is it that we can entrust the solutions for the problems that confront our country today to those who are complicit in their creation?"

— Cynthia McKinney, Green Party

"At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

— George Orwell

"The real bias of the media is not to the left or to the right, but to the thin strata of economic elites at the top of our society."

— Jim Hightower, in one of his daily commentaries

"All corporate-owned, publicly-traded media is our first and most immediate enemy."

— Michael Ruppert, CollapseNet

"Local TV news across the country [is] saturated with mayhem and fluff at the expense of the broader range of issues important to our communities. TV news has become an emotional collection of the terrifying and the titillating, chosen to generate what marketing experts call 'arousal.' Arousal prepares viewers for TV news' abundant advertising but it does not inform citizens. Rather, it breeds cynicism, discourages civic participation, and promotes fearful withdrawal and passivity."

— Rocky Mountain Media Watch

"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."

— Ansel Adams

"It used to be that scientists studied nature as a way of looking into the mind of God. Now it isn't like that. Most science these days is being financed by corporations or political interests seeking specific results."

— William Fender, biologist, quoted in "Sierra"

"Putting somebody new in the seat of power in the old machine is not going to make any difference."

— KMO, host of the C-Realm Podcast

"I do not recall ever receiving a suggestion, let alone an order, from the White House as to how I should make a regulatory decision. How times have changed."

— Russell Train, former EPA head, commention on Bush Administration interference with science

"To live in fear and falsehood is worse than death."

— Zend-Avesta (Zoroastrian text)

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"Just as there may be a time lag between [pollution] emissions and exposure, there may also be a time lag between exposure and [human or ecological] damages."

— US EPA Report, "Unfinished Business: A Comparative Assessment of Environmental Problems"

"Pollution should never be the price of prosperity."

— Al Gore, in a 2000 presidential-campaign speech

"Pollution often disappears when we switch to renewable resources."

— David Morris, in "Utne Reader" [1989]

"Waste equals food."

— William McDonough, author of the book Cradle to Cradle

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"The hungry world cannot be fed until and unless the growth of its resources and the growth of its population come into balance. Each man and woman—and each nation—must make decisions of conscience and policy in the face of this great problem."

— Lyndon B. Johnson

"We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves."

— Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"Given continued high rates of population increase, all environmental victories are temporary."

— Tom Horton, Chesapeake Bay advocate

"The greenest house is the one that never gets built."

— Whit Faulconer, GreenBlue

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"Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology."

— William Irwin Thompson

"Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem."

— Barry Commoner, "Orion Nature Quarterly" [1990]

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"What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn't have any doubt—it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn't want to go anywhere else."

— Hal Boyle

"Every eight months, nearly 11 million gallons of oil run off our streets and driveways into our waters—the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez oil spill."

— “America’s Living Oceans”
[Pew Oceans Report, 2003]

"No one has the right to use America's rivers and America's waterways, that belong to all the people, as a sewer. The banks of a river may belong to one man or one industry or one state, but the waters which flow between the banks should belong to all the people."

— President Lyndon B. Johnson,
upon signing the Clean Water Act of 1965

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"I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten."

— Anita Roddick

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"People, not developers, built cities and towns."

— Richard Domikis

"Humanity, in the desperate attempt to fit 8 billion or more people on the planet and give them a higher standard of living, is at risk of pushing the rest of life off the globe."

— E.O. Wilson

"Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a rat—glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning?"

— Frank N. Ikard

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"We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service relationship to humanity."

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city ... Gas-filled, noisy and hazardous, our streets have become the most inhumane landscape in the world."

— James M. Fitch

"Even though cars get worse gas mileage than two decades ago, they actually have become much more efficient. The problem is that the efficiency went into more power and larger, heavier vehicles, not into fuel economy. If all of the technological efficiency improvements had gone into efficiency, miles per gallon would be significantly higher than they are today."

— Neal Elliott, Industrial Program Director,
American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy

"Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance."

— Brian Tracy

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"Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans."

— Jacques Cousteau

"We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one."

— Jacques Cousteau

"Rising oil prices have focused the world's attention on the depletion of oil reserves. But the depletion of underground water resources from overpumping is a far more serious issue. Excessive pumping for irrigation to satisfy food needs today almost guarantees a decline in food production tomorrow."

— Lester Brown, author of Plan B 4.:  Mobilizing to Save Civilization

"When drinking water, remember its source."

— Chinese proverb

"Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away the hunger."

— Saint Basil

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