“By polluting clear water with slime you will never find good drinking water.”
The planet is not something we inherit from our parents but something we borrow from our children — you will find that sentiment echoed throughout these quotes on nature, conservation, climate, and our responsibility to the world we live in.
“The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.”
“By polluting clear water with slime you will never find good drinking water.”
“The industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company's bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy.”
“More than ever before, there is a global understanding that long-term social, economic, and environmental development would be impossible without healthy families, communities, and countries.”
“My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.”
“People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.”
“No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.”
“After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.”
“This Nation has realized significant environmental improvements over the last three decades.”
“I think an old style of addressing environmental problems is ebbing, but the rise of the so-called conservative, political movement in this country is not a trend towards the future but a reaction to this very broad shift that we are undergoing.”
“Over and over, we hear politicians say they can't spend our tax dollars on environmental protection when the economy is so fragile.”
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
“We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.”
“This is absolutely bizarre that we continue to subsidize highways beyond the gasoline tax, airlines, and we don't subsidize, we don't want to subsidize a national rail system that has environmental impact.”
“We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice. We have fought for criminal justice. Now we must add a new fight - the fight for electoral justice.”
“You will die but the carbon will not its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.”