Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty. — John Ruskin
Just like a single cell, the character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that propel life. — Bruce H. Lipton
For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports. — Sandra Postel
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That's why we call it present.
To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from. — Terry Tempest Williams
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
Environmentally friendly cars will soon cease to be an option...they will become a necessity. — Fujio Cho
Yesterday is a history; Tomorrow a mystery; Today is a gift; That's why we call it the present
The Truly Healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating. — William H. Stewart
The phenomenon of emergence takes place at critical points of instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback loops. Emergence results in the creation of novelty, and this novelty is often qualitatively different from the phenomenon out of which it emerged. — Fritjof Capra
The use of sea and air is common to all; neither can a title to the ocean belong to any people or private persons, forasmuch as neither nature nor public use and custom permit any possession therof. — Elizabeth I
Environmental Issues Quotes
Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature, will not be fooled. — Neil deGrasse Tyson
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 fate of the living planet is the most important issue facing mankind. — Gaylord Nelson
People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue. — Michael Pollan
When future generations judge those who came before them on environmental issues, they may conclude "they didn't know": let us not go down in history as the generations who knew, but didn't care — Mikhail Gorbachev
Raising awareness on the most pressing environmental issues of our time is more important than ever. — Leonardo DiCaprio
Don’t let your history interfere with your destiny.
Do not listen to those who say there is nothing you can do to the very real and large social and environmental issues of our time. — Maude Barlow
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
You cannot achieve environmental security and human development without addressing the basic issues of health and nutrition. — Gro Harlem Brundtland
Real security, in other words, is inseparable from issues of energy policy; education; public health; preservation of soils, forests, and waters; and broadly based, sustainable prosperity. — David W. Orr
Nature And Environment Quotes
Polka dots can't stay alone. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of our environments. — Yayoi Kusama
We never know the worth of water till the well is dry. — Thomas Fuller
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
Those who tell the stories rule society.
There are forces in nature called Love and Hate. The force of Love causes elements to be attracted to each other and to be built up into some particular form or person, and the force of Hate causes the decomposition of things. — Empedocles
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
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think. — Gregory Bateson
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. — John Muir
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed. — Mahatma Gandhi
Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die. — Gil Scott-Heron
The old Lakota was wise. He knew that man's heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans too. — Luther Standing Bear
Natural Environment Quotes
Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission - to be of service to them whenever they require it. — Francis of Assisi
One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew i would never see it again? — Rachel Carson
Uniformity is not nature's way; diversity is nature's way. — Vandana Shiva
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift.
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
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
The goal of life is living in agreement with nature. — Zeno of Elea
The theory that religion is a force for peace, does not fits the facts of it's history.
When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can't eat money. — Alanis Obomsawin
When elected officials abandon our environment and ruin our natural resources, public health is endangered. I know the importance of providing a clean environment for our children; I have attended more than one funeral for a child who has died from an asthma attack. — Gwen Moore
Human nature is a constant, and when you put that constant into different environments, it produces different behavior. That makes environment the independent variable. — Tim Urban
You can only get really unpopular decisions through if the electorate is convinced of the value of the environment. That's what natural history programmes should be for. — David Attenborough
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
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
Don't let your history interfere with your destiny.
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
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
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
If you're someone who genuinely believes that women don't deserve or aren't as much as men, you're like the plague. On the big history chart, you're the plague... It's just pointless and deadly.
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
Because we don't think about future generations, they will never forget us. — Henrik Tikkanen
More Environmental History Quotes
When future generations judge those who came before them on environmental issues, they may conclude "they didn't know": let us not go down in history as the generations who knew, but didn't care — Mikhail Gorbachev
Chernobyl is a unique place on the planet, where nature revives after a world-wide man-made disaster, where there is a real 'ghost town.' — Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Within the various acts of the ecodrama should be included scenes in which men's and women's roles come to center stage and scenes in which Nature 'herself' is an actress. — Carolyn Merchant
We are not makers of history. We are made by history.
In the eternal youth of Nature, you may renew your own. — John Muir
There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm. — Theodore Roosevelt
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
We're running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere... can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe. — Elon Musk
I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life - past, present, and future. — Rachel Carson
Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial. — Kalle Lasn
Environmental history... refer[s] to the past contact of man with his total habitat. . . . The environmental historian like the ecologist [s]hould think in terms of wholes, of communities, of interrelationships, and of balances. — Roderick Nash
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference. — Jared Diamond
Does a poet create, originate, initiate the thing called a poem, or is his behavior merely the product of his genetic and environmental histories? — B. F. Skinner
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable. — T. S. Eliot
For those who believe that ecological disaster will somehow be averted, it must also be clear that, over the next decade or so, sustainable development will constitute one of the biggest opportunities in the history of commerce. And innovation will be the name of the game. — Stuart L. Hart
One person can make all the difference in the world. For the first time in recorded human history, we have the fate of the whole planet in our hands. — Chrissie Hynde
Environmental history fit[s] into the framework of New Left history. [It is] history "from the bottom up," except that here the exploited element [is] the biota and the land itself. — Roderick Nash
We are facing a tipping point of environmental crisis unprecedented in human history and our very survival is dependent on protecting nature. — Leonardo DiCaprio
The planetary phase of history has begun, but the future shape of global society remains profoundly uncertain. Though perhaps improbable, a shift toward a planetary civilization of enriched lives, human solidarity, and environmental sustainability is still possible. — Paul Raskin
What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant. — Douglas Rushkoff
It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a scam. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming. — John Coleman
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. — Jared Diamond
I've been there for so many crossroads in American history. My whole political life spans the birth of the environmental movement, the women's movement, the civil rights movement, putting an end to unjust wars, and so and so. — Barbara Boxer
Who would have predicted a century ago that the richest civilizations in history would be made up of polluted tracts of suburban development dominated by the private automobile, shopping malls, and a throwaway economy? Surely, this is not the ultimate fulfillment of our destiny. — Alan Thein Durning
The history of the universe and nature is being told to us by the stars, by the Earth, by the uprising and elevation of the mountains, by the animals, the woods and jungles, and by the rivers. Our task is to know how to listen and interpret the messages that are sent to us. The original peoples knew how to read every movement of the clouds, the meaning of the winds, and they knew when violent downpours were coming... We have forgotten all that. — Leonardo Boff
Man's history is woven into waterways, for not only did he live beside them, but he used them as highways for hunting, exploration, and trade. Water assured his welfare, its absence meant migration or death, its constancy nourished his spirit. A mountain, a desert, or a great forest might serve his need of strength, but water reflects his inner needs. — Sigurd F. Olson
For too much of history, we've viewed the world's precious resources - both environmental and human - as things to extract, to make the most of in order to maximize their potential. — Jacqueline Novogratz
Beside the grand history of the glaciers and their own, the mountain streams sing the history of every avalanche or earthquake and of snow, all easily recognized by the human ear, and every word evoked by the falling leaf and drinking deer, beside a thousand other facts so small and spoken by the stream in so low a voice the human ear cannot hear them. — John Muir
We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all. — Aldo Leopold
We may be entering a new phase of history, a time when we begin to rediscover . . . the traditional teaching that power must entail restraint and responsibility, the ancient awareness that we are interdependent with all of nature and that our sense of community must take in the whole of creation. — Donald Worster
There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last. — Donald Worster
Early ecologists soon realised that, since humans are organisms, ecology should include the study of the relationship between humans and the rest of the biosphere. ... We don't often tend to think about the social sciences (history, economics and politics) as subcategories of ecology. But since people are organisms, it is apparent that we must first understand the principles of ecology if we are to make sense of the events in the human world. — Richard Heinberg
Judi Bari did something that I believe is unparalleled in the history of the environmental movement. She is an Earth First! activist who took it upon herself to organize Georgia Pacific sawmill workers into the IWW…Well guess what friends, environmentalists and rank and file timber workers becoming allies is the most dangerous thing in the world to the timber industry! — Darryl Cherney
Char Miller's lively, insightful account of the life and world of American forester Gifford Pinchot fills a vitally important gap in environmental and conservation history. Anyone captivated by the issues and controversies surrounding the preservation and development of the nation's natural heritage should read this engaging, carefully researched biography. — Carolyn Merchant
Government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol from corn will go down in history as the "Iraq War" of environmental solutions: ill-considered, costly, and disastrous. — Van Jones
During the 1960s, we used twice as much oil as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind's previous history. — Jimmy Carter
In Conclusion
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