Deforestation Quotes

“These folk are hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore we are their unfriends, and if they will not depart we shall afflict them in all ways that we can.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“We need to save the forests. I have a big warehouse we can store them in.”
― Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic

“The evolution of human mentality has put us all in vitro now, behind the glass wall of our own ingenuity.”
― John Fowles, The Tree

“Trees, how many of 'em do we need to look at?”
― Ronald Reagan

“Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut--hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs--products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"--as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees.”
― David James Duncan, The River Why

“Ethiopia is the center of origin and diversity for the majority of coffee we drink. The commodification of coffee pushes farmers to grow as much as possible by whatever means possible. This has contributed to deforestation. The place where coffee was born - the area with the greatest biodiversity of coffee anywhere in the world - could disappear. No forest, no coffee. No coffee, no forest. What we lose isn't specific to Ethiopia; it impacts us all.”
― Preeti Simran Sethi, Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love

“It gets me thinking about the history of this land, of this whole world, even. How someone got it in their head that ripping down thousand-year-old trees was a-okay. How people who grow gardens are crunchy; how people who grow their stock portfolios are sophisticated. How Tenn’s mom’s land, with its birdsong and dappled light and ancient mushrooms, will be destroyed in just a few days because a few rich people want more money and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
― Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, Witch of Wild Things

“What will happen to all the carpenters when all of the wood is gone?”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Will carpenters become the farmers of tomorrow when all of the trees are no more?”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“From the soil to the table, it is essential alternative systems be
designed to curb deforestation and stop climate breakdown.”
― Donna Maltz, Conscious Cures: Soulutions to 21st Century Pandemics

“In the year before Joanna’s protest at its Manila office, Shell paid out more money to its shareholders than any other company in the world: $20 billion, comfortably beating second-placed Apple. Its chief executive Ben van Beurden earned over $62,000 a day. Such fantastic rewards were possible only because the full costs of Shell’s products were being shouldered by others, who would continue to bear them − along with people yet unborn − far into the future.”
― Simon Mundy, Race for Tomorrow: Survival, Innovation and Profit on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis

“Sawdust takes me back to my childhood when there were trees to be seen.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Is there life left in a woodchip?”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Man wants a home and so, too, do all the animals.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Technology will replace the environment with big screens.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Carpenters will make you see the finer points of wood that you missed when they were trees.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Dead wood won't grow trees.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Who loses out when all the trees are gone?
Everyone!”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Lungs are meant to be filled with air, not smoke.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Blink!
And you will miss the forest.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“Maybe they are running out of land for themselves…Forests cut down by the thousands. Conquests. New Kingdoms. Shifting cultivation. In the world we men have made, there is no room for them…or for that matter, us”
― Gourav Mohanty, Sons of Darkness

“Hallucination Country by Stewart Stafford

A furious tribe of leaves,
Chased a logging truck,
As forked flames waved,
From a burning backyard tree.

A half-eaten unicorn in a ditch,
A warning from hunters nearby,
Slaughtering fairytale creatures,
Cryptids were their mint targets.

An abandoned Volkswagen car lay,
Half-overturned, underbelly exposed,
The injured driver, now hitchhiking,
With a spree killer or tow-truck driver.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“In general, the well-off have the money to outsource their deforesting as they buy food and other commodities grown by clearing land in other countries. As we have seen, they don’t stop deforesting, they just do it somewhere far from home.”
― Fred Pearce, A Trillion Trees: How We Can Reforest Our World

“We see the climate changing every day. In the past, everything was in time but these days, it’s out of time and it’s affecting everything and everyone. We must work with nature and not against it.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya, Our Nepal, Our Pride

“Every summer, news broadcasts are full of reports of devastating fires.All this would make me immensely frustrated at the people who didn't care about Mother Nature, especially those destroying it in the name of greed.”
― Anna LeMind, The Power of Misfits: How to Find Your Place in a World You Don’t Fit In

“Human beings go on living as if they own the whole world. There are two misconceptions that humans hold, which constitute the major portion of all the wrongs that they do. First is that the Earth belongs to humans and the second is that humans belong to Earth.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“walking in the Cambrian Desert, it sometimes seems impossible to imagine trees returning there, the emptiness stands as an incontestable fact, as if it were a matter of geology, not ecology”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“As increasing human population and fires from the savannah are continuously eating into the forest belt, it seems likely that the distribution of the forest members of the fusca group will continue to retract. In 1912 Simpson described how G. Fusca was found in Sierra Leone along a certain 37-mile stretch of road which ran through thickly wooded country skirting mountains densely clothed in thick forest; in 1946 I visited the area to find no fusca, but bare mountains, grassland, and only a few patches of low secondary thicket.”
― T. A. M Nash, Africa's bane: the tsetse fly

“This was the sound of strength. The sound of men shaping the land and cutting down pagan idols. Soon the trees would be gone, and the bare hills would be crawling with civilization. Avram was the sharp point of that progress. The blade that felled. The arm that moved.”
― Marcel M. du Plessis, The Doom of Balar