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The following are some famous environmental quotes centered on the theme of food, agriculture, and nutrition. If you would like to go to the online environmental forum Click Here.
“Little ol' boy in the [Texas] Panhandle told me the other day you can still make a small fortune in agriculture. Problem is, you got to start with a large one.”
- Jim Hightower
“It is vitally important that we can continue to say, with absolute conviction, that organic farming delivers the highest quality, best-tasting food, produced without artificial chemicals or genetic modification, and with respect for animal welfare and the environment, while helping to maintain the landscape and rural communities.”
- Prince Charles
“I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate plants.”
- A. Whitney Brown
“For years we've been told that America is the land of plenty. And while we have plenty of food available to eat, as a rule, most of it is of very poor quality and very lacking in trace minerals. Minerals are less accessible both because chemicals and acid rain have killed off our ground micro-organisms and the minerals in our farming soils are becoming depleted.”
- Dr. Sherry A. Rogers
“Family farmers are victims of public policy that gives preference to feeding animals over feeding people. This has encouraged the cheap grain policy of this nation and has made the Beef Cartel the biggest hog at the trough.”
- Howard Lyman
“GM and agriculture have become so commercially driven that the applications of the technology have become severed from their basic science roots- it’s moving forward at a tremendous pace to produce all these crops for commercial use, but at the same time it doesn’t heed the warnings of our deepening understanding of biology, ecology and genetics.”
- Dr. Michael Antoniou
“As far as genetic engineering for food, that is the great experiment that has failed. They literally have the entire world market against them. All those dreams… the blind will see, the lame will walk… has turned out to be science fiction. They are basically chemical companies selling more chemicals. They’ve been able to spread these herbicide-promoting plants around because it is more convenient for farmers who can just mass-spray their crops. But they’ve given absolutely nothing to the consumer while causing more chemical pollution and contamination.”
- Andrew Kimbrell
“Contrary to what they would like the public to believe, GE crops are neither needed nor beneficial. They have become a dangerous diversion from the real task of providing sustainable food for our world. The technologies of genetic engineering are crude, unreliable, uncontrollable and unpredictable- in short, they do not qualify as technologies.”
- Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
“It can be argued that gene transfer via recombinant DNA techniques resembles the process of viral infection far more closely than it resembles traditional breeding.”
- Dr. Patrick Brown
“If you follow my statutes and keep my commandments and observe them faithfully, I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.”
- God; Leviticus 26:3-4
“The fight is never about grapes or lettuce. It is always about people.”
- Cesar Chavez
“The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.”
- Wendell Berry
“When we kill the animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings.”
- Dr. William C. Roberts
“If you step back and look at the data, the optimum amount of red meat
you eat should be zero.”
- Dr. Walter Willett
“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
“Farmers are the only indispensable people on the face of the earth.”
- Li Zhaoxing
“I see worries in the fact that we have the power to manipulate genes in ways that would be improbable or impossible through conventional evolution. We shouldn’t be complacent in thinking that we can predict the results.”
- Colin Blakemore
“The law mandates a precautionary approach. It does not demand demonstration of danger, it requires proof of safety. It states that if there are reasonable doubts about the safety of bioengineered foods- doubts that have not been conclusively resolved through solid testing- the foods should not be brought to market.”
- Richard Stroman
“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances of survival for life on earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”
- Albert Einstein
“We can plant wheat every year, but the people who are starving die only once.”
- Fiorello H. La Guardia
“I took the initiative to raise my concerns publicly on GM food because I thought what was being claimed was simply not representative of the truth…if you move genes around in the very imprecise way that gene technology does, you’re simply going to disrupt normal gene function and you’re going to bring about unpredictable outcomes that are far greater than the intended changes. I felt that what was being put out by the government and industry scientists about the technology was simply inaccurate.”
- Dr. Michael Antoniou
“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
“You cannot achieve environmental security and human development without addressing the basic issues of health and nutrition.”
- Gro H. Brundtland
“When you go to the grocery store, you find that the cheapest calories are the ones that are going to make you the fattest - the added sugars and fats in processed foods.”
- Michael Pollan
“Most of the public lands in the West, and especially the Southwest, are what you might call cow burnt. Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of [cows].... They are a pest and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the native bluestems and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles of *****ly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and cacti. They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the crested wheat grass. Weeds. Even when the cattle are not physically present, you see the dung and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction. If you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West stinks of cattle.”
- Edward Abbey
“An alien ecologist observing... Earth might conclude that cattle is the dominant animal species in our biosphere.”
- Dr. David Hamilton Wright
“They're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.”
- Jeremy Rifkin
“We human beings are part of 'biodiversity.' We are dependent on the whole food chain down below us.”
- Darrell Merrell
“One's stomach is one's internal environment.”
- Samuel Butler
“The other major problem with introducing GMOs is gene flow. This is as significant as buildup of resistance, probably more significant.”
- Jeremy Rifkin