Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage. — Jacques Yves Cousteau
Without environmental sustainability, economic stability and social cohesion cannot be achieved — Phil Harding
What we call 'economic growth' is in fact a growth in waste and a decline in the health of natural habitat — Satish Kumar
Loads of chemicals and hazardous wastes have been introduced into the atmosphere that didn't even exist in 1948. The environmental condition of the planet is far worse than it was 42 years ago. — Gaylord Nelson
One thing leads to the other. Deforestation leads to climate change, which leads to ecosystem losses, which negatively impacts our livelihoods - it's a vicious cycle. — Gisele Bundchen
One of the major problems is what we do to the soil, the air, the water and everything, we take in our food. — Charlotte Gerson
Environmental challenges have the power to deny equality of opportunity and hold back the progress of communities. — Lisa P. Jackson
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans. — Jacques Yves Cousteau
It is only logical that the pauperization of our soul and the soul of society coincide with the pauperization of the environment. One is the cause and the reflection of the other. — Paolo Soleri
A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmental damaging consumption patterns. — Maurice Strong
The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture. — Gaylord Nelson
The most important issue of the 21st century will be the condition of the global environment. — Ian McHarg
Short Environmental Degradation Quotes
Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today — Jacques Yves Cousteau
The environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis. — Thomas Berry
There is an increasing sense of what can be called legal pollution. — Thomas Ehrlich
A sound eco-environment is the most basic public good that benefits all. — Xi Jinping
I will permit no one to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate them.
Environmental Pollution Quotes
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children — Chief Seattle
We never know the worth of water till the well is dry. — Thomas Fuller
We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death." — Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth
Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you. — Wendell Berry
We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. — Albert Einstein
Despite Arizona's remarkable growth in recent years, we have met the current federal health standards for ozone pollution and the Environmental Protection Agency recently approved our dust control plan. — Jane D. Hull
A person is up-graded and degraded by his attitude.
If ordinary people really knew that consciousness and not matter is the link that connects us with each other and the world, then their views about war and peace, environmental pollution, social justice, religous values, and all other human endeavors would change radically. — Amit Goswami
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us. — Henrik Tikkanen
We've polluted the stratosphere with these chlorine and bromine compounds, and because it's now colder, and because we have this change in the climate, we're getting more ozone loss than we would have gotten in a normal year. — Paul Newman
The sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away. — Stephanie Mills
Degradation Quotes
... no man or woman should depend upon another for maintenance and necessaries. Family discord and social degradation will never end till each depends upon herself. — Anandi Gopal Joshi
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. — Frederick Douglass
Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole — Karl Marx
I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds. — Robert Byrd
There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life, fully, entirely, completely-or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. — Oscar Wilde
The moment anyone tries to demean or degrade you in any way, you have to know how great you are. Nobody would bother to beat you down if you were not a threat. — Cicely Tyson
To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Muhammad and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have kept on developing. — George S. Patton
I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him. — Booker T. Washington
We want freedom for our country, but not at the expense or exploitation of others, not us to degrade other countries...I want the freedom of my country so that other countries may learn something from my free country so that the resources of my country might be utilized for the benefit of mankind. — Lal Bahadur Shastri
Human beings are capable of virtually limitless degradation; they are also capable of virtually limitless improvement and achievement. Success depends on goals and on diligence in pursuing them. — Mas Oyama
Destroying The Environment Quotes
Look closely at nature. Every species is a masterpiece, exquisitely adapted to the particular environment in which it has survived. Who are we to destroy or even diminish biodiversity? — E. O. Wilson
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. — Wallace Stegner
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. — Marshall Berman
The earth will not continue to offer its harvest, except with faithful stewardship. We cannot say we love the land and then take steps to destroy it for use by future generations. — Pope John Paul II
Capitalism and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet...Climate change has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life. — Evo Morales
When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people. So our environmental movements have been justice movements. — Vandana Shiva
Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves. — Jonas Salk
We won't have a society if we destroy the environment. — Margaret Mead
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
Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race or people, barbaric or civilized — Hugh Hammond Bennett
Destruction Of Nature Quotes
All the advantages that man has gained from his ever-deepening understanding of the natural world that surrounds him, his technological, chemical and medical progress, all of which should seem to alleviate human suffering... tends instead to favor humanity's destruction. — Konrad Lorenz
Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason. In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction. — Marion Woodman
Natural erosion had reduced the critical barrier islands in the Gulf, the result of the destruction of some 300,000 acres of wetlands. This amounted to 30 miles of marshlands. — Mortimer Zuckerman
The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century. — Philip Shabecoff
Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness. — Wilhelm Reich
Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them. — Wendell Berry
Most relativists believe that relativism is absolutely true and that everyone should be a relativist. Therin lies the self-destructive nature of relativism. The relativist stands on the pinnacle of an absolute truth and wants to relativize everything else. — Norman Geisler
I suddenly realized. The zebra. It is not something outside of us. The zebra is something inside of us. Our fears. Our own self-destructive nature. The zebra is the worst part of us when we are face-to-face with our worst times. The demon is us! — Garth Stein
No civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural support systems. Nor will ours. — Lester R. Brown
Real change will only happen when we fall in love with our planet. Only love can show us how to live in harmony with nature and with each other and save us from the devastating effects of environmental destruction and climate change — Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Environmental Problems Quotes
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. — Gregory Bateson
There are nuclear weapons in China, Iran, Korea and Pakistan. It wouldn't take much to send a couple of warheads off on this planet somewhere that would cause a lot of environmental damage, then if you have got someone who wants to retaliate you have real problems. — Edward James Olmos
The extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on Earth - social and environmental. — Ingrid Newkirk
The young generation can influence their elders and can make them understand the environmental problems that are faced by us today. The youth can make them see that our environment is deteriorating day by day. — Oren Lyons
Environmental problems are really social problems anyway. They begin with people as the cause and end with people as the victims — Edmund Hillary
Most Americans don't know about environmental problems, because we have in our country a negligent and indolent press. The biggest lie that the right wing holds in our country is that there is such a thing as a liberal media. Americans are getting their news from the right-wing media. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
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. — David Foreman
Environmental degradation, overpopulation, refugees, narcotics, terrorism, world crime movements, and organized crime are worldwide problems that don't stop at a nation's borders. — Warren Christopher
Industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems — Cyril Connolly
Smog is affecting larger parts of China, and environmental pollution has become a major problem, which is natures red-light warning against the model of inefficient and blind development. — Li Keqiang
Environmental Crisis Quotes
When the well is dry, we know the worth of water. — Benjamin Franklin
The environmental crisis has deep spiritual, philosophical, and religious roots and causes. It is not merely the result of bad engineering. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr
When you've spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands. — Margaret Thatcher
The warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences. — Al Gore
It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life. — Rene Dubos
The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done - challenging us to a realization of a new humanity. — Jean Houston
The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die. — Barry Commoner
It is essential that we take steps to prevent chemical substances from becoming environmental hazards. Unless we develop better methods to assure adequate testing of chemicals, we will be inviting the environmental crisis of the future. — Richard M. Nixon
Today, we live in a world of incredible wealth and technology, alongside the most horrendous conditions of poverty, war and environmental crisis. This is result of capitalism, a system based on prioritizing profits not human need where the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a capitalist elite. — Kshama Sawant
The threat of environmental crisis is the 'international disaster key' to unlock the New World Order. — Mikhail Gorbachev
World Environment Quotes
Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment — David Attenborough
If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. — E. O. Wilson
The environment is where we all meet; where all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share. — Lady Bird Johnson
Exercise, from a public health perspective, is an unmitigated failure. The world's longest-lived people live in environments that nudge them into more movement. They don't use power tools, they do their own yard work, they grow a garden. — Dan Buettner
The lasting pleasures of contact with the natural world are not reserved for scientists but are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of earth, sea and sky and their amazing life. — Rachel Carson
But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy...One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy any more. — Ottmar Edenhofer
Factory farming is terrible for the environment—not to mention that it's gross. The best thing you can do, if you think about it, is to become a vegetarian and just spread the word. The world would change for the better for animals, humans, and the planet if everyone took that step. — Christofer Drew
Global warming is part of natural cycle and there's nothing we can actually do to stop these cycles. The world is now facing spending a vast amount of money in tax to try to solve a problem that doesn't actually exist. — David Bellamy
There are so many different walks of life, so many different personalities in the world. And no longer do you have to be a chameleon and try and adapt to that environment - you can truly be yourself. — Hope Solo
Ecological Crisis Quotes
We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man. — Lynn Townsend White, Jr.
Let’s start with the most prominent ecological crisis of our time: global warming. When you look seriously at the numbers, you find that switching from a meat-based to a plant-based diet would do more to curb and reverse global warming than any other initiative. — T. Colin Campbell
Women's struggle for equality worldwide is about more than equality between men and women. Our struggle is about reversing the trends of social, economic, political, and ecological crisis - a global nervous breakdown! Our struggle is about creating sustainable lives and attainable dreams. — Bella Abzug
We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren't enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage. — Mikhail Gorbachev
Although two thirds of our planet is water, we face an acute water shortage. The water crisis is the most pervasive , most severe, and most invisible dimension of the ecological devastation of the earth. — Vandana Shiva
More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crises until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one. — Lynn Townsend White, Jr.
The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis. — Vandana Shiva
I think there's going to be a tug of war in this country over who are the real patriots because at a time of national crisis, economic collapse and calamity, ecological peril and social dislocation, the American people deserve to be a partner to the American government. — Van Jones
The roots of our ecological crises are axiomatic: they lie in our belief and value structures which shape our relationship with nature, with each other and the lifestyles we lead. — Ziauddin Sardar
There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful. — Dalai Lama
Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by economic physicians who treat the basic malady of unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited growth.... Yet one certainly does not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatment dosage. — Herman E. Daly
Environmental degradation is one of the biggest challenges we have. I think a question that we're not asking ourselves is: 'Isn't humanity committing suicide with this indiscriminate and tyrannical use of nature?' — Pope Francis
It's clear that agriculture, done right, is the best means the world has today to simultaneously tackle food security, poverty and environmental degradation. — Irene Rosenfeld
The essential role of the environment is still marginal in discussions about poverty. While we continue to debate these initiatives, environmental degradation, including the loss of biodiversity and topsoil, accelerates, causing development efforts to falter. — Wangari Maathai
The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment. — Derrick Jensen
Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change. — Muhammad Yunus
All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated. — Kofi Annan
Well, for starters, we have to do more to create demand for new technologies that can reduce our dependence on foreign oil and environmental degradation. — Sherwood Boehlert
Instead, we have found ourselves gasping for air in a sea of corruption, dysfunction, environmental degradation, waste, disenchantment and inequality—and the harder we compete, the more unequal we become. — Margaret Heffernan
Wealth and vegetation go together, and that exacerbates environmental injustice. The poor bear the burden of degraded environments. — Natalie Jeremijenko
consumption can be very harmful to the world. I'm not a big proponent of the idea that consumption makes you morally bad, but there are consequences to our acts, and those consequences are environmental degradation and the huge social inequalities that make our standard of living in the United States possible. — Judith Levine
Today the great gift of God's Creation is exposed to serious dangers and lifestyles which can degrade it. Environmental pollution is making particularly unsustainable the lives of the poor of the world ... we must pledge ourselves to take care of creation and to share its resources in solidarity. — Pope Benedict XVI
The women of the Green Belt Movement have learned about the causes and the symptoms of environmental degradation. They have begun to appreciate that they, rather than their government, ought to be the custodians of the environment. — Wangari Maathai
We have a situation where we are rich really as a world overall, and yet we have the capacity to destroy ourselves, either through nuclear weapons or through environmental degradation, and we allow the life chances of hundreds of millions of people to be destroyed because we haven't found the will to tackle it — Tony Blair
Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation. — Kurt Vonnegut
I would like to see the U.S. fighting another war, perhaps in addition to that against terror: a war on poverty, illiteracy, disease and environmental degradation. It is certainly within the power of your country to act on all of these fronts, but, unfortunately, your leaders have become obsessed with a single issue. — Oscar Arias
My advice to everybody would be to go out as much as possible and deal with social inequality and environmental degradation because these issues are increasingly prescient. — David Harvey
Understanding what is going on in the world today inspires me in a negative sense because there's so much about it that I don't like - political stupidity, environmental degradation, etc. And that makes me want to change it, to make a difference in the world. — Theodora Goss
The environmental movement could do a better job incorporating the message about the connection between poverty and environmental degradation, and building that message at the grassroots level. — Helene D. Gayle
In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death. — Ian McEwan
Few if any political philosophers have had the courage of tackling the Cold War. Even the best of them have kept silent or have stated some bromides glossing over the serious shortcomings of "our" side, such as racism, social injustice, extreme income disparities, the exploitation of the Third World, and environmental degradation. — Mario Bunge
Perhaps the simplest example is a synthetic plastic, which unlike natural materials, is not degraded by biological decay. It therefore persists as rubbish or is burned-in both cases causing pollution. In the same way, a substance such as DDT or lead, which plays no role in the chemistry of life and interferes with the actions of substances that do, is bound to cause ecological damage if sufficiently concentrated. — Barry Commoner
Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it. — Barry Commoner
Man, especially in our time, has without hesitation devastated wooded plains and valleys, polluted waters, disfigured the earth's habitat, made the air unbreathable, disturbed the hydro-geological and atmospheric systems, turned luxuriant areas into deserts and undertaken forms of unrestrained industrialization, degrading that 'flower bed'-which is the earth, our dwelling place. — Pope John Paul II
I find it difficult to accept that it is the will of God that humanity should degrade, deface, desolate, and ultimately perhaps destroy His Creation on Earth. Yet this is the course on which we are embarked. — Russell E. Train
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. — Lester R. Brown
Muslims have been an almost entirely benevolent force in the 20th century. They did not wreak the havoc the Western powers wreaked on the world. They have not come anywhere near to the environmental degradation that we've done to the planet. So I think Muslims need to be seen in the proper light. They're mostly decent, hardworking people, people with deep family values, and they want to live in peace. — Hamza Yusuf
Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original. — Anthony Doerr
Peace should be understood in a human way - in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights. — Muhammad Yunus
The only truly dependable production technologies are those that are sustainable over the long term. By that very definition, they must avoid erosion, pollution, environmental degradation, and resource waste. Any rational food-production system will emphasize the well-being of the soil-air-water biosphere, the creatures which inhabit it, and the human beings who depend upon it. — Eliot Coleman
In Conclusion
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