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