Ecological Quotes

Here is a collection of quotes with ecological content, that can be a source of inspiration to us all.

From Environmental Illness - A Patients View

The biggest problem in the world could have been solved when it was small.
-- Lao-tzu

If you want to see an endangered species, get up and look in the mirror.
-- John Young, former Apollo astronaut and present associate Director at NASA

Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors... Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.
-- Albert Einstein (quoted in London Times, July 1, 1985)

The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.
-- Albert Einstein (quoted in advertising)

When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.
-- Benjamin Franklin

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men
-- Abraham Lincoln

Perhaps it is time to risk being right for the wrong reason - as did our predecessors who successfully prevented the spread of infectious disease by cleaning up pollutants in the absence of complete knowledge about the microbes they contained.
-- Sandra Steingraber in "Living Downstream" on the rising rate of cancers and other diseases thought to be caused by pollution

The 1990s were the decade of decision for our species, and we didn't take the steps necessary to ensure our survival.
-- Gar Smith, editor of Earth Island Journal

We must limit our technological interventions into nature long before we have definitive scientific proof of harm. This is the principle of precautionary action, and if we don't adopt it, nature will get along just fine without us.
-- Peter Montague in Rachels Environmental & Health Weekly

This we know... the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to earth. All things are connected, like blood which connects one family. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the children of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life - he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
-- Chief Seattle, 1854

"We have overwhelmed the natural systems from which we emerged and created the dangerous illusion that we no longer depend on a healthy environment. As a result, humanity now faces a challenge that rivals any in its history: restoring balance with nature while expanding economic opportunities for the billions of people whose basic needs--for food and clean water, for example--are still not being met."
-- Worldwatch Institute in its 1998 State of the World

Capturing the suns warmth can help us turn down the earths temperature.
-- President Bill Clinton, on his Million Solar Roofs initiative

Barry Commoner's five laws of ecology:
Everything is connected to everything else.
Everything must go somewhere.
Nature knows best.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
If you don't put something in the ecology, it's not there

Man is a strange animal, he doesn't like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.
-- Adlai Stevenson

Better sign the papers while [the planet] is still willing to make a deal.
-- Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist

Human inventiveness has created problems because human judgement and humanity's ability to deal with the consequences of its creations lag behind its ability to create.
-- Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, biologist

If it had been the purpose of human activity to bring the planet to the edge of ruin, no more efficient mechanism could have been invented than the market economy.
-- Jeremy Seabrook.

There is something fundamentally wrong in treating the earth as if it was a business in liquidation.
-- Herman Daly, quoted in "Earth in the Balance"

"Did we put our kids in 0.5-mile-per-gallon (mpg) tanks and 17 feet per gallon aircraft carriers because we failed to put them in 32-mpg cars?"
-- Hunter Lovins on the Gulf War (also called The First Oil War).

"Gegen dumheit kempfen selbst die Goetter vergebens".
Translated: Against stupidity, even the Gods are powerless.
-- Goethe, German Philosopher

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
-- Max Planck, German Physicist, winner of Nobel Prize for the quantum theory.

A thinking human, that does, is worth fifty that just eat.
-- Richard Perez, editor of Home Power magazine

Reality must take precedence over public relations, because nature cannot be fooled.
-- Unknown.

It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have.
-- B. Earl Puckett, President, Allied Stores Corp

Many women gain self respect from their appearance, and is doomed to eventual failure.
-- Steen Hansen Hviid

Human history becomes more a race between education and catastrophe.
-- H. G. Wells, 1920

Mining is like a search-and-destroy mission.
-- Stewart Udall, former US secretary of the interior

"I think most people in business understand that we are running into a funnel of declining resources globally. We will soon be 10 billion people on Earth -- at the same time, as we are running out of forests, crop land, and fisheries. We need more and more resource input for the same crop or timber yield. At the same time pollution is increasing systematically and we have induced climate change. All that together creates a resource funnel."
-- Robert Karl-Henrik Robert

Perhaps it is time to risk being right for the wrong reason - as did our predecessors who successfully prevented the spread of infectious disease by cleaning up pollutants in the absence of complete knowledge about the microbes they contained.
-- Sandra Steingraber in "Living Downstream" on the rising rate of cancers and other diseases thought to be caused by pollution

You treasure most what you have lost. In Europe, unspoiled wilderness is very rare, hence people are more interested in preservation than people in the American West, which have not yet lost it.
-- Steen Hansen Hviid

Earth day offered little political analysis, no vision of how corporate America has manipulated consumer demand, how corporate interests have gradually shaped our addiction to products containing a wide array of environmentally destructive chemicals, how American companies went from producing one billion pounds of toxic chemicals in 1940 to over 220 billion in 1987. Earth Day failed to educate people about the limited choices consumers really have, and how industry, especially the automotive, petrochemical and paper industries, bear more responsibility than the rest of us. Earth Day organizers, in their efforts to be inclusive and broad based, missed a momentous opportunity to educate millions of people about the real causes of the environmental crises: the chemical invasion of our society and the lack of democratic decision making in the production (and disposal) of goods.
-- Gary Cohen in Toxic Times, summer 1990.


From Environmental Illness - A Patients View