Famous Environmental Quotes - Online Environmental Discussion Forum
Sorry we do not offer a custom search at this point. We tried a custom search box, but it wasn't effective in listing all the content under a certain search. In fact it only listed less than 10% of the quotes in this entire site, for a few specific searches we did. We are currently looking for alternative to the custom search we used. We apologize for the inconvenience. We expect to have a custom search available sometime this week. Right now (July 15, 2008), we have 1,093 famous environmental quotes posted on this site. The target is 20,000 by the end of 2008. Once the target is reached, Ecoopinion.com will contain the largest selection of environmental quotes on the internet. A "Quotes by Author" version will feature an alphabetical version of all Authors with 10 quotes or more, a brief biography, and their Country of origin. Keep coming back and make sure to link us on your site, so other people can discover the site as well. Don't forget to visit the forum and be one of the first people to make a post with your questions, opinions, solutions, and comments on a wide range of environmental topics.
Famous Environmental Quotes on Activism
Famous Environmental Quotes on Animal_Rights
Famous Environmental Quotes on City Structure, Land Use, the Human Environment, and Urban Sprawl
Famous Environmental Quotes on Climate Change (global warming)
Famous Environmental Quotes on Consumerism, Capitalism, and the Economic Model
Famous Environmental Quotes on Dangerous Chemicals and Pollution
Famous Environmental Quotes on Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition
Famous Environmental Quotes on Forestry
Famous Environmental Quotes on Humanity, Culture, and Society
Famous Environmental Quotes on Manufacturing and the Industrial Process
Famous Environmental Quotes about Nanotechnology
Famous Environmental Quotes on Oceans, Fisheries, Lakes, Rivers, and Water Use
Famous Environmental Quotes on Outer Space as well as Visions of Space Exploration and Colonization
Famous Environmental Quotes on Over-Population
Famous Environmental Quotes on Sustainable and Conventional Transportation
Famous Environmental Quotes about War
Famous Environmental Quotes on Waste Management and Recycling
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The following are some famous environmental quotes centered on the themes of biodiversity, the natural environment, natural resources, and future generations. If you would like to go to the online environmental discussion forum Click Here.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.”
- Native American Proverb
“So the environment is not a luxury, not a Gucci accessory bag or a fancy silk tie affordable only when all other issues have been resolved.”
- Klaus Toepfer
“They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.”
- James G. Watt
“This generation of politicians is the last generation who have it in their power to secure the future of our planet, to safeguard the health and livelihoods of millions of people and the habitats that sustain their lives. History will not forgive them if they fail to act.”
- Dr. Catarina Cardoso
“I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
“Environmentalism is no longer about wilderness protection; it's about saving the collective neck of humanity.”
- Michael Oppenheimer
“It is the millions of acts by ordinary people that will eventually make a difference.”
- Hamish McRae
“What changed in the United States with Hurricane Katrina was a feeling that we have entered a period of consequences.”
- Al Gore
“War is usually fought over diminishing resources, particularly those that we perceive to be extremely valuable.”
- Dennis Weaver
“Let us… permit nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs than we.”
- Montaigne
“The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.”
- Marya Mannes
“Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“To save the Children, sustainable development means that each generation should leave to its children a world at least as diverse and productive as the one it inherited. It also means guaranteeing the rights of all today's children, so that they can fulfil their potential in the struggle for development. The millions of children still denied their basic rights as a result of poverty, violence or environmental degradation testify to the international community's failure to make this vision a reality.”
- Mike Aaronson
“I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.”
- Nigerian chef
“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments -- there are consequences.”
- Robert Green Ingersoll
“God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If our nation took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
“In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment.”
- Richard Wilkinson
“We all Live Downstream.”
- Frank Carbone, Jr.
“It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it.”
- Edward Abbey
“It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood.”
- Bernand De Voto
“Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible – or even sinful – that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!”
- Dr. Paul MacCready, Jr.
“Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become more effective.”
- Rachel Carson
“Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“First I thought I was fighting for the rubber tappers, then I thought I was fighting for the Amazon, then I realized I was fighting for humanity.”
- Chico Mendes
“This we know. The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth. This we know. All things are connected Like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.”
- Chief Seattle
“By 2050 a million species could face extinction.”
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC)
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.”
- Wallace Stegner
“The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.”
- Paul Hawken
“A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmental damaging consumption patterns.”
- Maurice Strong
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Sustainable development is never going to materialise as a result of edicts from New York or Geneva. It needs to be constructed, shared and implemented in a truly global way that takes account of traditional, local and non-Western approaches.”
- Steve Bass
“Why try to change the future when the present is so bleak?”
- Sam Bysh
“We must be certain that the repair to the environment is sufficient to allow wild species to recover and survive.”
- Norm Dicks
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”
- Chief Seattle
“For four-fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pond scum.”
- J. W. Schopf
“It is that range of biodiversity that we must care for - the whole thing - rather than just one or two stars.”
- David Attenborough
“Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations.”
- David Gerrold
“The magnificence of mountains, the serenity of nature - nothing is safe from the idiot marks of man's passing.”
- Loudon Wainwright
“Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.”
- Buckminster Fuller
“The earth will continue to regenerate its life sources only as long as we and all the people of the world do our part to conserve its natural resources. It is a responsibility which every human being shares.”
- Gerald Ford
“Geologists have a saying - rocks remember.”
- Neil Armstrong
“We have the duty to protect the life of an unborn child.”
- Ronald Reagan
“Preserving and maintaining this nation’s cultural diversity is as important to the survival of America as is preserving and maintaining biological diversity. What we are preserving in rural farming and timber communities is people, not abstractions or symbols, but real people who embody basic values which are fundamental to our nation’s history and its traditions.”
- Dr. Robert Lee
“Nature's laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.”
- Luther Burbank
“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”
- Carl Sagan
“Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.”
- Marshall McLuhan
“A spaceship is a delicately balanced environment. Every element that doesn't contribute to the overall functioning of the system is by definition working against it. The same is true of our planet – our mothership – though sadly, most architecture today is slowly fatal to nature's systems”
- Constance Adams
“I'd like to think that the actions we take today will allow others in the future to discover the wonders of landscapes we helped protect but never had the chance to enjoy ourselves.”
- Annie Leibovitz
“The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are gradually exhausting our fisheries, our topsoil, our water. On top of that, we're coming to the end of world resources.”
- Jared Diamond
“Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.”
- Jacques Yves Cousteau
“Hydrogen holds great promise to meet many of our future energy needs, and it addresses national security and our environmental concerns. Hydrogen is the simplest, most abundant element in the universe.”
- Dan Lipinski
“It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life.”
- Rachel Carson
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
- John Muir
“We must recognize that we're all part of a web of life around the world. Anytime you extinguish a species, the consequences are serious.”
- Gaylord Nelson
“When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion.”
- Ethiopian Proverb
“Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.”
- Chekhov
“A margin of life is developed by Nature for all living things - including man. All life forms obey Nature's demands - except man, who has found ways of ignoring them.”
- Eugene M. Poirot
“It's not an if - we're going to have to change. Oil is simply going to be gone.”
- Dennis Weaver
“Christianity, with its roots in Judaism, was a major factor in the development of the Western worldview.... A basic Christian belief was that God gave humans dominion over creation, with the freedom to use the environment as they saw fit. Another important Judeo-Christian belief predicted that God would bring a cataclysmic end to the Earth sometime in the future. One interpretation of this belief is that the Earth is only a temporary way station on the soul's journey to the afterlife. Because these beliefs tended to devalue the natural world, they fostered attitudes and behaviors that had a negative effect on the environment.”
- Donald G. Kaufman
“So bleak is the picture… That the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century.”
- Philip Shabecoff
“Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”
- Garrett Hardin
“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
- Edward O. Wilson
“The coal mining industry is very destructive and it doesn't have to be.”
- Kevin Richardson
“This is the first age that's ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.”
- Arthur C. Clarke
“There is no doubt that environmentally related diseases will continue to pose problems in the future.”
- Samuel Wilson
“The worst thing that can happen during the 1980s is not energy depletion, economic collapses, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly that our descendants are least likely to forgive us for.”
- Edward O. Wilson
“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects . . . We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.”
- David Foreman
“Simply put, drilling in ANWR would be expensive, environmentally devastating, and would do very little to fix our energy crisis or to bring down the price of oil and gasoline.”
- Allyson Schwartz
“We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems.”
- Janet Holmes á Court
“It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.”
- David Attenborough
“You see that pale, blue dot? That's us. Everything that has ever happened in all of human history, has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs and all the tragedies, all the wars all the famines, all the major advances... it's our only home. And that is what is at stake, our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization. I believe this is a moral issue, it is your time to cease this issue, it is our time to rise again to secure our future.”
- Al Gore
“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
“Your descendants shall gather your fruits.”
- Virgil
“When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.”
- E. O. Wilson
“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
“We—human beings—are part of 'biodiversity.' We are dependent on the whole food chain down below us.”
- Darrell Merrell
“The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.”
- Barry Commoner
“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
“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
“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
“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
“Our choices at all levels—individual, community, corporate and government—affect nature. And they affect us.”
- David Suzuki
“The World we all share is given to us in trust. Every choice we make regarding the earth, air, and water around us should be made with the objective of preserving it for all generations to come.”
- August A. Bush III
“The fundamental principles of ecology govern our lives wherever we live, and ... we must wake up to this fact or be lost.”
- Karin Sheldon
“The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture.”
- Gaylord Nelson
“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
“What we do today, right now, will have an accumulated effect on all of our tomorrows.”
- Alexandra Stoddard
“Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.”
- Richard Feynman
“The only way to save a rhinoceros is to save the environment in which it lives, because there's a mutual dependency between it and millions of other species of both animals and plants.”
- David Attenborough
“Implementing the three R's - reduce, recycle, reuse, will help you save money and help protect the environment! And, if we protect the environment we are reducing our stress by living in a healthy world.”
- Catherine Pulsifer
“Nature never hurries: atom by atom, little by little, she achieves her work. The lesson one learns from yachting or planting is the manners of Nature; patience with the delays of wind and sun, delays of the seasons, bad weather, excess or lack of water.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.”
- Jacques Yves Cousteau
“Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves.”
- Jonas Salk
“Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.”
- Bernoulli
“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
“The ‘Web of Life’ is, of course, an ancient idea, which has been used by poets, philosophers, and mystics throughout the ages to convey their sense of the interwovenness and interdependence of all phenomena.”
- Fritjof Capra
“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.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
“We in the industrialized world make a greater difference because our ecological footprint, our impact on the condition of the environment, is 40 to 50 times larger than that of people in the developing world.”
- Maurice Strong
“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
“The idea of wilderness needs no defense. It only needs defenders.”
- Edward Abbey
“We must not be forced to explore the universe in search of a new home because we have made the Earth inhospitable even uninhabitable. For if we do not solve the environmental and related social problems that beset us on Earth- pollution, toxic contamination, resource depletion, prejudice, poverty, hunger – those problems surely accompany us to other worlds.”
- Donald G. Kaufman and Cecilia M. Franz
“No one is predicting the extinction of life, nor man, but certainly civilization as we know it is at risk. This is not based on feelings but many sciences. The carrying capacity of the earth has been exceeded and we are currently living off non-sustainable consumption of cheap pools of finite natural resources we found lying about less than 100 years ago.”
- Doug Bashford
“Our posterity will wonder about our ignorance of things so plain.”
- Seneca
“Teach your children. What we have taught our children: that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.”
- Chief Seattle
“Ultimately, we are the endangered species... Homo sapiens are perceived to stand at the top of the pyramid of life, but the pinnacle is a precarious station. We need a large measure of self-consciousness to constantly remind us of the commanding role we enjoy only at the favor of the web of life that sustains us.”
- Sen. Leahy
“Our biggest challenge in this new century is to take an idea that seems abstract - sustainable development - and turn it into a reality for all the world's people”
- Kofi Annan
“Building a world where we meet our own needs without denying future generations a healthy society is not impossible, as some would assert. The question is where societies choose to put their creative efforts.”
- Christopher Flavin
“Nature is a collective idea, and, though its essence exist in each individual of the species, can never in its perfection inhabit a single object.”
- Henry Fuseli
“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
“Upwards of two hundred species.. mostly of the large, slow-breeding variety.. are becoming extinct here every day because more and more of the earth's carrying capacity is systematically being converted into human carrying capacity. These species are being burnt out, starved out, and squeezed out of existence.. thanks to technologies that most people, I'm afraid, think of as technologies of peace. I hope it will not be too long before the technologies that support our population explosion begin to be perceived as no less hazardous to the future of life on this planet than the endless production of radioactive wastes.”
- Daniel Quinn
“The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a unique and biologically special place that should be preserved.”
- Dan Lipinski
“The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.”
- Moliére
“I believe that we have the capacity to choose symbiosis over self-destruction. But we need a rapid, massive and global awakening at a personal level if we are not to go the way of any disease successfully thwarted by its host.”
- James Lovelock
“What I really wanted was to travel and see all the different animals that were on the verge of extinction.”
- Leonardo DiCaprio
“The environment, after all, is where we all meet, where we all where we all have a mutual interest. It is one thing that all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens on what we can become.”
- Lady Bird Johnson
“We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.”
- Barbara Ward
“We need to start looking at having a way of managing the whole ecosystem, because you can't pick away at it piece by piece, you have to truly start being coordinated and managing our resources as a system. We haven't gotten to that point yet.”
- Ted Danson
“For example, the Prime Minister earlier this year talked about the importance of the Arctic to our future. He's right. A hundred years from now, the strength of Canada is going to be coming from our resources in the Arctic.”
- Brian Mulroney
“We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing and evolving dinosaurs.”
- Jared Diamond
“Government experts have estimated that Alaska National Wildlife Refugee reserves would only provide enough oil for six months of U.S. oil consumption. In addition, the oil industry itself has estimated that it would take 10 years to bring this oil to the market.”
- Allyson Schwartz
“We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”
- Albert Einstein
“The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?”
- David Attenborough
“The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. If we save a priceless woodland today, it is threatened from another quarter tomorrow.”
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas
“Now that Americans have recognize a measure of importance to wilderness, they are panic-struck about this and have delivered this panic to our doorsteps. Now we are forced to help them quell than panic and bring relief. It is certainly within our altruistic nature to help, but I wonder if their relief requires our death.”
- Theresa J. Pederson
“The famous balance of nature is the most extraordinary of all cybernetic systems. Left to itself, it is always self-regulated.”
- Joseph Wood Krutch
“What is the good of having a nice house without a decent planet to put it on?”
- Henry David Thoreau
“Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.”
- William Ruckelshaus
“When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?”
- Jeremy Rifkin
“We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.”
- Maurice Strong
“Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.”
- Dan Lipinski
“First, we should not be opening our coasts, all of our coasts, to oil drilling when we have not taken the first step, not the first step, to conserve oil.”
- Sherwood Boehlert
“Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wildlife's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.”
- Anton Chekhov
“Our fresh water and oceans are being polluted, soils are eroding, rivers are running dry, wetlands are disappearing, fisheries are collapsing, rangelands are deteriorating, temperatures are rising, coral reefs are dying, and not since a meteor hit the Earth 65 million years ago have so many species of plants and animals become extinct in such a short time.”
- Leonardo DiCaprio
“Practically every environmental problem we have can be traced to our addiction to fossil fuels, primarily oil.”
- Dennis Weaver
“The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, well I read a science fiction novel that tells me it's not a problem. If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame-retardant. You take action. The planet has a fever.”
- Al Gore
“The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet.”
- John F. Kennedy
“It takes an earthquake to remind us that we walk on the crust of an unfinished planet.”
- Charles Kuralt
“Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.”
- Earth Charter
“The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic.”
- Alekey Leonov
“The environment is the common denominator of all humanity. It's our common ground, quite literally - it's the thing we all share and it's connected to everything else.”
- Julia Louis-Dreyfus