Jane Goodall - Jacob Bronowski - Ian Hislop TV - Chain Reaction 1996 - George W Bush - The Young Ones TV - The Independent - Tim Flannery - Bill Nye - David Suzuki - Francis Brett Young - Panorama TV - Al Gore - Jordan Maxwell - Bianca Jagger - Report From Iron Mountain 1967 - John Steinbeck - The First Global Revolution 1991 - Jimi Hendrix - Jacques-Yves Cousteau - Patrick Ness - Dan Quayle - R Buckminster Fuller - Michael Moore - Jack Herer - Fay Godwin - Doctor Who - George Carlin - Ronald Reagan - Rachel Carson - Richard Mackarness - John F Kennedy - H Bentley Glass - Theodore Roosevelt - Ralph Nader - Hubert H Humphrey - Ha-Joon Chang - Slavoj Zizek - Gloria Reuben - Birds Britannia TV - Stewart Udall - Fracking: Shattered Ground TV - Iain Stewart TV - Noam Chomsky - Koch Brothers Exposed 2014 - The Curse of Oil TV - The True Cost 2015 - Stacey Dooley TV - Storyville: Poisoning America: The Devil We Know TV - The Cover Up at Times Beach 2017 - City 40 2016 - Horizon: Toxic Town: The Corby Poisonings TV - The World According to Monsanto 2008 - Dispatches TV - Gasland 2010 - Josh Fox - Atomic Homefront TV - Tonight TV - How Corporate Greed Destroyed East Palestine TV - Seconds from Disaster TV -
How come then that this so-intellectual being is destroying its only home? ... We are destroying, we are polluting, we are damaging the future of our own species. Jane Goodall, primatologist
We think of pollution as a modern blight but it’s not. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 8/13: The Drive For Power, BBC 1973
In 1862 [Charles] Kingsley wrote the book he’s most famous for – The Water Babies ... He campaigned for improved sanitation and against the pollution of rivers. Ian Hislop’s Age of the Do-Gooders II: Suffer the Little Children, BBC 2010
We need a pollution revolution. And it’s not going to be easy because the world is addicted to petroleum. Chain Reaction 1996 starring Morgan Freeman and Brian Cox & Keanu Reeves & Rachel Weisz & Fred Ward & Kevin Dunn & Joanna Cassidy & Nicholas Rudall & Tzi Ma et al, director Andrew Davis, opening scene
Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter! George W Bush, parting words at G8 summit, punching air and grinning widely July 2008
Pollution. All around
Sometimes up.
Sometime down.
But always – around.
Pollution. Are you coming to my town?
Or am I coming to yours?
Ha! We’re on different buses, Pollution.
But we’re both using petrol.
Bombs. The Young Ones s1e4: Bomb ***** Rick’s poem, BBC 1982
A Dirty Fight: A giant oil corporation has been fined $8.6 billion for an environmental disaster that has been called the Amazon’s Chernobyl. But guess what? It may end up paying nothing. The Independent headline 16th February 2011
Coal-fired power plants produce the most incredibly damaging waste we know that’s changing the nature of our atmosphere. Professor Tim Flannery, chairman Copenhagen Climate Council
Burning carbon-based substances like oil, gas, and especially coal, produces billions of tons of extra carbon dioxide each year. Methane gas from cows and pigs and other animals on our large farms ends up in the atmosphere as well, trapping more of the sun’s energy as heat. Bill Nye
Too often, governments are quick to use excessive force and even pervert the course of justice to keep oil and gas flowing, forests logged, wild rivers dammed and minerals extracted. As the Global Witness study reveals, citizens are often killed, too – especially if they’re poor and indigenous. David Suzuki
By this time the day had changed in a manner characteristic of the Black Country. I’ve told you already how in the early morning we got the impression that the sky had been washed by dew and all its impurities drained downward into the lower levels of the coal measures. One reason for this clearness was that the day before had been Sunday, and ninety per cent of the smoke stacks were at rest. But all morning the chimneys of Dulston and Wolverbury and Darsall, and all the other congeries of red brick with uncouth names, had been disgorging their fumes of unconsumed carbon and sprays of steam, until a grayish yellow cloud hung over them. There wasn’t a breath of wind that day; if it had been left to itself, the stuff would just have settled down on them like soup; but all the time fresh filth went on bubbling up from the bottom, so that the basin gradually filled, with the result that by midday its skimmings had reached the level of our sky. You couldn’t see them, and yet they took every bit of colour out of the landscape, just as though we were looking through smoked glass. They were like a poison in our lungs; they made the air we breathed seem flat, devitalized, warm. We could taste their faint acridity with our tongues. All the time this thin, invisible poison came creeping up the slope of the hill. Evelyn spoke of it as a fog; we Londoners know the meaning of an honest fog; but this wasn't a fog, it was a blight.
So we walked on through a landscape that was like a spoiled photographic plate. We followed the line of the Roman causeway between banks of rusty hazel. The surface of the road had been repaired by a dressing of slag that gave it a feeling of black sterility. The fields that we saw on either side of it, wherever the hedges straggled into gaps, had no greenness in them. They were dotted with mounds of ashes, on which no weeds would grow, and pits of dirty water. No trees but an occasional black and twisted hawthorn. In one field a huge circular boiler of a type that has long since been discarded lay on its side like a stranded buoy. No Man’s Land with a vengeance! Francis Brett Young, Cold Harbour
And as we stood there, a curious thing happened: a kind of window opened in the rain, just as if a cloud had been hitched aside like a curtain, and in the space between we saw a landscape that took our breath away. The high ground along which the road ran fell away through a black, woody belt, and beyond it, for more miles than you can imagine, lay the whole basin of the Black Country, clear, amazingly clear, with innumerable smokestacks rising out of it like the merchant shipping of the world laid up in an estuary at low tide, each chimney flying a great pennant of smoke that blew away eastward by the wind, and the whole scene bleared by the light of a sulphurous sunset. No-one need ever tell me again that the Black Country isn’t beautiful. In all Shropshire and Radnor we’d seen nothing to touch it for vastness and savagery. And then this apocalyptic light! It was like a landscape of the end of the world, and, curiously enough, though men had built the chimneys and fired the furnaces that fed the smoke, you felt that the magnificence of the scene owed nothing to them. Its beauty was singularly inhuman and its terror – for it was terrible, you know – elemental. It made me wonder why you people who were born and bred there ever write about anything else. ibid.
Storms, cyclones, drought, high winds and floods – a foretaste of global warming, a change in the climate caused by man’s pollution of the planet. Panorama, The Big Heat, Steve Bradshaw reporting, BBC 1990
Sewage is being routinely released in our rivers and seas. So why isn’t the pollution being stopped? We reveal how regulation is failing. How water companies can cheat environmental tests. And how the companies can make pollution incidents disappear. Panorama: The Water Pollution Cover-Up, BBC 2023
Blackpool: This year the beach was awash with sewage. ibid.
A pollution-based tax system principally CO2: we’re causing it mainly, the vast majority of it. The consequences are bad and will be catastrophic unless we act ... Put a price on the carbon. Tax is the best way. Cap and trade can also do it ... I am in favour of both. Al Gore
Translation: allow pollution to deliberately get worse until it can be manipulated by the controlled media into a world crisis. A global crisis has to be developed. One substitute for war has now been found. The Iron Mountain agenda is being carried out. Jordan Maxwell
The message was: US corporations have the right to pollute the entire planet. The people and the environment don’t matter. Bianca Jagger, 2001
Nevertheless, an effective political substitute for wars would require ‘alternative enemies’ some of which might seem equally far-fetched in the context of the current war system.
It may be, for instance, that gross pollution of the environment can eventually replace the possibility of mass destruction by nuclear weapons as the principle apparent threat to the survival of the species.
Poisoning of the air, and the principle sources of food and water supply is already well advanced. Report from Iron Mountain 1967, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-27553
The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die. John Steinbeck
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill ... All these dangers are caused by human intervention ... But the real enemy, then, is humanity itself. The First Global Revolution, 1991, published by globalist think-tank Club of Rome
There’s a need for harmony between man and Earth. I think we’re really screwing up that harmony by dumping garbage in the sea and air pollution and all that stuff. And the sun is very important. Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans. Jacques-Yves Cousteau
One hundred and fifty years ago, the monster began, this country had become a place of industry. Factories grew on the landscape like weeds. Trees fell, fields were up-ended, rivers blackened. The sky choked on smoke and ash, and the people did, too, spending their days coughing and itching, their eyes turned forever toward the ground. Villages grew into town, towns into cities. And people began to live on the earth rather than within it. Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls
It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it. Dan Quayle