I do not know of any environmental group in any country that does not view its government as an adversary. Gro Harlem Brundtland
I think the environmental movement is basically elitist. Dr Patrick Moore, cited Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s1e13: Environmental Hysteria
I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend? Robert Redford
What could be more fulfilling than getting together to dance, yell and save the world from environmental catastrophe? But is it the same catastrophe as 1971, or is it a different catastrophe? Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s1e13: Environmental Hysteria, Showtime 2003
[Bjorn] Lomborg’s extensive research shows that right now the health of the planet is improving on almost all fronts. ibid.
Is passion supposed to replace common sense? ibid.
No end justifies the means of lying. ibid.
The danger that Doomsday is waiting just round the corner is that we end up prioritising incorrectly. ibid. Bjorn Lomborg, environmental activist sceptic
Environmentalists are motivated by a sense of righteousness. Mark Lynas
I would like to see an environmental movement that is comfortable noticing when it’s wrong and announcing that it’s wrong. Stewart Brand, environmentalist & author
In the space of a few generations we have laid waste to paradise. The Tall-grass Prairie has been transformed into a corn factory where wildlife means the exotic pheasant. The Shortgrass Prairie is a grid of carefully fenced cow pastures and wheatfields. The Passenger Pigeon is no more; the last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. The endless forests of the East are tame woodlots. With few exceptions, the only virgin deciduous forest there is in tiny museum pieces of hundreds of acres. Fewer than one thousand Grizzlies remain. The last three condors left in the wild were captured and imprisoned in the Los Angeles Zoo. (An expensive reintroduction effort has since been started.) Except in northern Minnesota and northwestern Montana, wolves are known as scattered individuals drifting across the Canadian and Mexican borders. Four percent of the peerless Redwood Forest remains and the ancient forests of Oregon are all but gone. The tropical cats have been shot and poisoned from our Southwestern borderlands. The subtropical Eden of Florida has been transmogrified into hotels and citrus orchards. Domestic cattle have grazed bare and radically altered the composition of the grassland communities of the West, displacing Elk, Moose, Bighorn Sheep, and Pronghorn and leading to the virtual extermination of Grizzly Bear, Gray Wolf, Cougar, and other ‘varmints’. Dams choke most of the continent’s rivers and streams. Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood, Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching
One pesticide in particular became the target: DDT. It was dangerously sprayed outside indiscriminately. But used inside in small quantities it was very effective against malaria. Environmentalists campaigned for governments around the world to ban it. What nobody realised at the time was the unintended consequences that might have. What the Green Movement Got Wrong
What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another. Mahatma Gandhi
We need the tonic of wildness ... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain’s majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea. George Carlin
Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance. Theodore Roosevelt
It is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird. Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals – not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at last it looks as if our people were awakening. Theodore Roosevelt
If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live. Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee
Environmental organizations are fomenting false fears in order to promote agendas and raise money. Michael Crichton
You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four and a half billion years old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away – all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park
My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first. Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed
No settled family or community has ever called its home place an environment. None has ever called its feeling for its home place ‘biocentric’ or ‘anthropocentric’. None has ever thought of its connection to its home place as ‘ecological’, deep or shallow. The concepts and insights of the ecologists are of great usefulness in our predicament, and we can hardly escape the need to speak of ‘ecology’ and ‘ecosystems’. But the terms themselves are culturally sterile. They come from the juiceless, abstract intellectuality of the universities which was invented to disconnect, displace, and disembody the mind. The real names of the environment are the names of rivers and river valleys; creeks, ridges, and mountains; towns and cities; lakes, woodlands, lanes roads, creatures, and people. Wendell Berry
People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it. Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism
[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs – whatever – just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game’s outcome. Slavoj Žižek
Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. Stephen Hawking
The Torrey Canyon was the first environmental disaster to unfold in the television era. Birds Britannia III: Seabirds, BBC 2010
Some global hazards are insidious. They stem from pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. And they will be aggravated as the population rises to a projected nine billion by mid-century, and by the effects of climate change. An ‘ecological shock’ could irreversibly degrade our environment. Martin Rees