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The following are some famous environmental quotes centered on the themes of city structure, the human environment, land use, the value of wilderness, and urbal sprawl. If you would like to go to the online environmental forum Click Here.
“Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species. Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.”
- Claude Levi-Strauss
“The reason lightening doesn’t strike twice in the same place is that the same place isn’t there the second time.”
- Willie Tyler
“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
“We live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making.”
- Joseph Chilton Pearce
“Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of natures varied forms.”
- George Washington Carver
“In the United States, there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.”
- Gertrude Stein
“Ironically, rural America has become viewed by a growing number of Americans as having a higher [quality of life] not because of what it has, but rather because of what it does not have!”
- Don A. Dillman
“Without wilderness, we will eventually lose the capacity to understand America. Our drive, our ruggedness, our unquenchable optimism and zeal and elan go back to the challenges of the untrammeled wilderness. Britain won its wars on the playing fields of Eton. America developed its mettle at the muddy gaps of the Cumberlands, in the swift rapids of its rivers, on the limitless reaches of its western plains, in the silent vastness of primeval forests, and in the blizzard-ridden passes of the Rockies and Coast ranges. If we lose wilderness, we lose forever the knowledge of what the world was and what it might, with understanding and loving husbandry, yet become. These are islands in time -- with nothing to date them on the calendar of mankind. In these areas it is as though a person were looking backward into the ages and forward untold years. Here are bits of eternity, which have a preciousness beyond all accounting.”
- Harvey Broome
“The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of the pond, the smell of the wind itself cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine. The air is precious to the red man, for all things are the same breath - the animals, the trees, the man.”
- Chief Seattle
“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land.”
- Aldo Leopold
“Time and space - time to be alone, space to move about - these may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow.”
- Edwin Way Teale
“We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well - for we will not fight to save what we do not love.”
- Stephen Jay Gould
“The dynamics of rainfall and erosion don't change over the years, but we do have urban sprawl. We used to have rivers and now we have housing developments.”
- Kekoa Paulsen
“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like gray vegetation.”
- Jean Arp
“As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with them.”
- Louis Bromfield
“The global destruction of cities and countryside, of human cultures and of nature itself, can only be reversed by a global philosophical, technical, cultural, moral and economic project: by an ecological project.”
- Leon Krier
“If you run out of water, you pray for rain. If you run out of soil, you pray for forgiveness.”
- Robert Kerrey
“There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness. In a civilization which requires most lives to be passed amid inordinate dissonance, pressure and intrusion, the chance of retiring now and then to the quietude and privacy of sylvan haunts becomes for some people a pyschic neccesity. The preservation of a few samples of undeveloped territory is one of the most clamant issues before us today. Just a few more years of hesitation and the only trace of that wilderness which has exerted such a fundamental influence in molding American character will lie in the musty pages of pioneer books. To avoid this catastrophe demands immediate action.”
- Robert Marshall
“I am in love with this green earth.”
- Charles Lamb
“The Yosemite, the Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon are national properties in which every citizen has a vested interest; they belong as much to the man of Massachusetts, of Michigan, of Florida, as they do to the people of California, of Wyoming, of Arizona.”
- Stephen Mather
“The wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit.”
- Joseph Wood Krutch
“This is what you should do; love the Earth and sun and the animals.”
- Walt Whitman
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“I mean, it is an extraordinary thing that a large proportion of your country and my country, of the citizens, never see a wild creature from dawn 'til dusk, unless it's a pigeon, which isn't really wild, which might come and settle near them.”
- David Attenborough
“Every part of all this soil is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hollowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. The very dust you now stand on responds more willingly to their footsteps than to yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch.”
- Chief Seattle
“The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth ... the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need -- if only we had the eyes to see.”
- Edward Abbey
“The suburbs are the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of man kind.”
- Jim Kunstler
“It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility.”
- Rachel Carson
“Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.”
- Chief Seattle
“The very process of the restoring the land to health is the process through which we become attuned to Nature and, through Nature, with ourselves.”
- Chris Maser