“When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.”
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.
“Have we failed to slow global warming pollution in part because climate and environmental activists have been too polite and well behaved?”
“When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.”
“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.”
“Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.”
“My lens of choice was always the 35 mm. It was more environmental. You can't come in closer with the 35 mm.”
“Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline - which prevented it from entering the environment.”
“Mark Ruffalo, aka the Incredible Hulk, is the natural gas industry's worst nightmare: a serious, committed activist who is determined to use his star power as a superhero in the hottest movie of the moment to draw attention the environmental and public health risks of fracking.”
“The infrastructure for linking environmental health and public health is not working as well as it should.”
“We must return to nature and nature's god.”
“A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.”
“I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I began putting more work into environmental history.”
“Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.”
“Have we failed to slow global warming pollution in part because climate and environmental activists have been too polite and well behaved?”
“If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.”
“It is important to consider whether the sample size selected by the Environmental Genome Project will provide sufficient power to discover most alleles relevant to gene-environment interactions.”
“I always thought we had an environmental problem, but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.”