Environmental Degradation Quotes

“Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn’t an “issue” to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.”
― Naomi Klein

“At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism.

Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers?”
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

“We are the hands and eyes and ears, the sensitive probing feelers through which the emergent, intelligent universe comes to know its own form and purpose. We bring the thunderbolt of meaning and significance to unconscious matter, blank paper, the night sky. We are already divine magicians, already supergods. Why shouldn't we use all our brilliance to leap in as many single bounds as it takes to a world beyond ours, threatened by overpopulation, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, hunger, and exploitation? Superman and his pals would figure a way out of any stupid cul-de-sac we could find ourselves in - and we made Superman, after all. All it takes is that one magic word.”
― Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human

“The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...”
― Ramez Naam, Crux

“The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the thing it looks upon to bless.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“Having a conscience now is a grief-soaked proposition”
― Stephen Jenkinson

“What has Capitalism resolved? It has solved no problems. It has looted the world. It has left us with all this poverty. It has created lifestyles and models of consumerism that are incompatible with reality. It has poisoned the waterways. Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, Seas, the Atmosphere, the Earth. It has produced an incredible waste of resources.
I always cite one example; imagine every person in China owned a Car, or aspired to own a Car. Everyone of the 1.1 Billion people in China, or that everyone of the 800 million people in India wished to own a Car, this method, this lifestyle, and Africa did the same, and nearly 450 million Latin Americans did the same. How long would Oil last? How long would Natural Gas last? How long would natural resources last? What would be left of the Ozone layer? What would be left of Oxygen on Earth? What would happen with Carbon Dioxide? And all these phenomenon that are changing the ecology of our world, they are changing Earth, they are making life on our Planet more and more difficult all the time.
What model has Capitalism given the world to follow? An example for societies to emulate? Shouldn’t we focus on more rational things, like the education of the whole population? Nutrition, health, a respectable lodging, an elevated culture? Would you say capitalism, with it’s blind laws, it’s selfishness as a fundamental principle, has given us something to emulate? Has it shown us a path forward? Is humanity going to travel on the course charted thus far? There may be talk of a crisis in socialism, but, today, there is an even greater crises in capitalism, with no end in sight.”
― Fidel Castro

“Unless government appropriately regulates oil developments and holds oil executives accountable, the public will not trust them to drill, baby, drill. And we must!”
― Sarah Palin

“God's will has to be done, in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that.”
― Sarah Palin

“The scale of the mess we leave behind is proportionate to the level of respect we have for others.”
― Stewart Stafford

“If we don't have a place for nature in our heart, how can we expect nature to have a place for us.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Veins Ignite: Either Integration or Degradation

“Humans...The land provides everything that anybody would need. If you take only what you need, the land renews itself so that it can provide more. Medicines, water, plants, meat. In exchange, because we don’t really have anything the land wants, we honor it for what it gives us...When you take more than the land can provide, it stops giving. It can’t give. That’s what’s happened here. That’s what happens with humans.”
― David Alexander Robertson, The Barren Grounds

“They've been given an explanation of how things came to be this way, and this stills their alarm. This explanation covers everything, including the deterioration of the ozone layer, the pollution of the oceans, the destruction of the rain forests, and even human extinction—and it satisfies them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it pacifies them. They put their shoulders to the wheel during the day, stupefy themselves with drugs or television at night, and try not to think too searchingly about the world they're leaving their children to cope with.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

“Because this is my land. I can feel it, tremendous, still primeval, looming, musing downward upon the tent, the camp—this whole puny evanescent clutter of human sojourn which after our two weeks will vanish, and in another week will be completely healed, traceless in this unmarked solitude. It is mine, though I have never owned a foot of it, and never will. I have never wanted to, not even after I saw that it is doomed, not even after I began to watch it retreat year by year before the onslaught of axe and saw and log-lines and then dynamite and plow. Because there was never any one for me to acquire and possess it from because it had belonged to no one man. It belonged to all; we had only to use it well, humbly, and with pride.”
― William Faulkner, Big Woods

“On what reasonable grounds would sincere, informed environmentalists refuse to join animal advocates in a campaign to protect increasingly threatened fish populations from the snapping teeth of humanity?”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Eating Earth: Environmental Ethics and Dietary Choice

“If you haven't heard what's happening with seeds, let me tell you. They're disappearing, about like every damn thing else. You know the story already, you know it better than I do, the forests and the songbirds, the Appalachian Mountains, the fish in the ocean. But I'm not going to talk about anything that makes us feel hopeless, or despairing, because there's no despair in a seed. There's only life, waiting for the right conditions--sun and water, warmth and soil--to be set free. Every day millions upon millions of seeds lift their two green wings.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Humanity cannot keep expanding in numbers and relentless destruction and still expect everything to be ‘ok’. We moved far beyond ‘ok’ a very long time ago, the world is in crisis because of us. To believe otherwise is dangerous and delusional. In this finite world we have only two choices - to change ourselves to fit within it or die out.”
― Luke Eastwood

“...a study of all 50 U.S. States found that those states marked out by large inequalities of power in terms of income and ethnicity had weaker environmental policies and suffered greater ecological degradation. Furthermore, one study covering 50 countries found the more unequal a country is, the more likely the biodiversity of its landscape is to be under threat.”
― Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist

“we have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch defined by humanity’s influence on the global environment.”
― Daniel C Esty, A Better Planet: Forty Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future

“We are landless and listless, so estranged from our planet, so removed from the decision-making that governs it, so isolated from each other and the life we share this world with that we're seemingly unable even to come together and prevent global human and environmental catastrophe. We're still being decided and conquered by [land] enclosure, only now the fences are invisible and internal too.”
― Rob Cowen, Common Ground

“I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises. I have heard people deny this, but I was born in 1970. I have seen enough to know that it is true. I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Only the man’s greed and scientific development is responsible for earth’s degradation of environment and ecology.”
― Dr. Ashok Anand

“All we need is to take an climate action now! Environment destruction of our common home increases every day. We need a better rain distribution on Earth, ecological awareness of minners, farmers and industry for the sustainable exploration of our natural resources.”
― Ronald Sanson Stresser Junior

“Fifteen miles above us, as was first discovered by the British Antarctic Survey nine years before, a hole in the ozone layer opened up at this time of the year (at its worst in November) and allowed dangerous levels of ultraviolet rays to descend unfiltered to Antarctica and southerly lands like Australasia and Patagonia.

Every year the hole grows bigger and more animals, including humans, suffer the resulting cancers, blindness and weakened immune systems. In Australia and New Zealand malignant melanomas have taken over from other cancers and heart disease as man's chief killers. In Patagonia, where sheep outnumber humans, whole flocks are going blind.”
― Ranulph Fiennes, Mind Over Matter: The Epic Crossing of the Antarctic Continent

“All the wonderful things in the world. All the ways life was better even if the world wasn't. This stutter-step of disaster after natural disaster was just a blip next to LED lights, driverless cars, a possible end to poverty through gene-edited crops.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander

“Unlike our ancient ancestors, we live in a world that is slowly but surely being poisoned by technology, industry and human encroachment on the natural world. [...]

As industry and technology systematically destroy the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, out health problems ahve increased dramatically. While modern medical science has virtually eliminated the virulent diseases that threatened the lives of our ancestors (smallpox, diptheria, polio, typhoid fever), a different kind of disease process is gradually destroying the body's ability to protect and heal itself.”
― Jason Elias, The Five Elements of Self-Healing: Using Chinese Medicine for Maximum Immunity, Wellness, and Health

“Hey! Pal! How do I get to town from
here?
And he said: Well, just take a right
where they're gonna build that new
shopping mall,
go straight past where they're gonna
put in the freeway,
take a left at what's gonna be the new
sports center,
and keep going until you hit the place
where they´re thinking of
building that drive-in bank. You can't
miss it.
And I said: This must be the place.”
― Laurie Anderson , United States Reprint edition by Anderson, Laurie (1984) Paperback

“We also know His creations are good because He pronounced them, Himself, to be good in the account of the creation. God also ordained mankind to be a wise steward over the earth and all things on it and to treat his creations with proper respect and care. This means that we are to preserve the earth for future generations to enjoy and experience their much-needed mortal experience. We therefore have absolutely no right to wantonly extort, destroy, maim, damage, or alter any living thing or aspect of our environment.”
― Eric Bjarnson Ph.D., Some Universals, Vol. 2: Intention and Attention

“The fortress site sat unattended and unexplored. It was scaring everyone away, and even the wildlife abandoned it. Mother Earth knew of the empty skies where birds used to call, so it longed for the natural rhythms to be restored. But no one looked upon this place and thought of it as anything natural. It was an abhorrence, an eyesore worthy of destruction.”
― BB Clifford, Rainbow Warrior: The Tale of Ares, The Battle-Lustful Son