Best Environmental Quotes

The good building is not one that hurts the landscape, but one which makes the landscape more beautiful than it was before the building was built.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

Forests are the lungs of our land.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

If man has not found ways to deal with environmental problems such as water and air pollution by 1998, it will be too late. The future is not determined and it lies in our own hands.

Be gentle with the earth.

Boundaries don’t protect rivers, people do.

Every country-or at least every country that is fit for habitation-has its own rivers; and every river has its own quality; and it is the part of wisdom to know and love as many as you can, seeing each in the fairest possible light, and receiving from each the best that it has to give.

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

A food waste reduction hierarchy-feeding people first, then animals, then recycling, then composting-serves to show how productive use can be made of much of the excess food that is currently contributing to leachate and methane formation in landfills.

Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

The first steps toward stewardship are awareness, appreciation, and the selfish desire to have the things around for our kids to see. Presumably the unselfish motives will follow as we wise up.

A building that has great environmental responsibility is a political animal in a way because it becomes promotional of a cause. I think that kind of advocacy through architecture is really good.

In all matters moderation is desirable. If a thing is carried to excess, it will prove a source of evil.

Yet, most of the readily accessible reserves of oil formed over hundreds of millions of years will be consumed within a single generation, spanning the years from 1960 to 1995.

No sustainable development, environmental harmony or lasting security will happen if we are unable to eradicate hunger and extreme inequality

I’m a latecomer to the environmental issue, which for years seemed to me like an excuse for more government regulation. But I can see that in rich societies, voters are paying less attention to economic issues and more to issues of the spirit, including the environment.

Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, ‘How do new structures arise in evolution?’ ‘Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?’ ‘How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?’ The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them.

What is the environmental platform of the Republican party? I don’t know either.

People who minister worldwide to protect and conserve the environment are of no lower status than those who minister to plant churches.

If I had to catalog all the moronic plot turns in The Day After Tomorrow, we’d be here until the next ice age. It’s just so very bad. You can have a pretty good time snickering at it-unless, like me, you think there’s something to this global warming thing, and you shudder at the irony of a movie meant to warn people about a dangerous environmental trend that completely discredits it. Is it possible that the film is a plot to make environmental activists look as wacko as anti-environmentalists always claim they are?

I certainly don’t live in a kosher home although I was raised in a kosher environment.

It’s hard to see a river all at once, especially in the mountains. Down on the plains, rivers run in their course as straightforward as time, channeled toward the sea. But up in the headwaters, a river isn’t a point where you stand. In the beginnings of the river, you teeter on the edge of a hundred tiny watersheds where one drop of water is always tipping the balance from one stream to another. History changes with each tiny event, shaping an outcome that we can only fully grasp in hindsight. And that view changes as we move farther downstream.

Population growth is exceeding farmers’ ability to keep up…Our oldest enemy, hunger, is again at the door.

We know what we have to do. And we know how to do it. If we fail to convert our self-destructing economy into one that is environmentally sustainable, future generations will be overwhelmed by environmental degradation and social disintegration. Simply stated, if our generation does not turn things around, our children may not have the option of doing so.

Children whose developing lungs are particularly vulnerable suffer the most from air pollution. For children, breathing the air in cities with the worst pollution, such as Beijing, Calcutta, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Tehran, is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

It’s not just global warming, it’s not just a loss of biodiversity, it’s not just the pollution of our oceans and the clearing of our rainforests and all these complicated systems, The [11th Hour] movie talks about the world economy, it talks about politics, it talks about personal transformation and environmental consciousness that we need to have in this generation to implement a lot of these changes that need to occur.

Promoting health without encouraging others to seek wholeness is an exercise in futility. Not until we realize that our bodies are mirrors of our interpersonal, spiritual, professional, sexual, creative, financial, environmental, mental, and emotional health will we truly heal.

If you violate Nature’s laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.

I’m very sceptical about the prospects for ‘big’ environmental causes – ‘saving the planet’, halving the world’s population, ending the exploitation of animals, and so on – but a person can ask him- or herself how he or she personally may exercise compassion or humility towards animals, vegetal life and so on.

Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We’re not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.