Environmental Crisis Quotes

Through our failure to acknowledge our oneness with the total of other population s of biological organisms...we reveal the egocentricity which has brought the world to the point of [environmental] crisis... the separation of man from his ecosystems ... has become an article of faith. ~ John Livingston. From "One Cosmic Moment"

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

At a time when we need an urgent national conversation about how schools and curriculum should address the environmental crisis, we're being told that the problems we need to focus on are teacher incompetence, government monopoly, and market competition. The reform agenda reflects the same private interests that are moving to shrink public space-interests that have no desire to raise questions that might encourage students to think critically about the roots of the environmental crisis, or to examine society's unsustainable distribution of wealth and power. ~ Bill Bigelow

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe. ~ Barry Commoner

Vassals of an outdated ideology unrelated to the real world, they can, when questioned on this issue, only mumble neoliberal mantras that have delivered the world economic stagnation, rising inequality and global environmental crisis ~ Richard Flanagan

The symbolism - and the substantive significance - of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis. ~ Al Gore

The threat of environmental crisis is the 'international disaster key' to unlock the New World Order. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

There has been a banking crisis, a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis, a geostrategic crisis and an environmental crisis. That's considerable in a country that's used to being protected. ~ Jean-Francois Cope

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side. ~ Eric Hobsbawm

[John Clare's] father was a casual farm labourer, his family never more than a few days' wages from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the written word. His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his mingled thoughts and observations on to the page as they occur, allowing you, as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The Nightingale's Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and you will see what I mean.
("John Clare, poet of the environmental crisis 200 years ago" in The Guardian.) ~ George Monbiot

It has often been said that our environmental crisis is a crisis of perception. We do not readily see the patterns that would reveal our dependence on the natural world, nor are we commonly aware of the systems within which we are deeply embedded. Our attention, entrained on objects and focused on flat screens, is far removed from the dynamic and animated nonhuman world. We are as good as blind to the wonder at our feet or the daily spectacle of an ever-changing sky. ~ Laura Sewall

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. ~ Muhammad Yunus

The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us. ~ Barry Commoner

Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they could work together and
care for each other. Such an inversion of the current world view requires intellectual courage for it exposes us to the unenlightened yet painful criticism of being not only anti-people and against economic progress, but equally against liberal education and scientific and technological advance. We must face the fact that the imbalance between man and the environment is just one of several mutually reinforcing stresses, each distorting the balance of life in a different dimension. In this view, overpopulation is the result of a distortion in the balance of learning, dependence on affluence is the result of a radical monopoly of institutional over personal values, and faulty technology is inexorably consequent upon a transformation of means into ends ~ Ivan Illich

The environmental crisis is a sign that the ecosphere is now so heavily strained that its continued stability is threatened. It is a warning that we must discover the source of this suicidal drive and master it before it destroys the environment-and ourselves. ~ Barry Commoner

The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what is happening are left with few visible avenues for environmental action other than purely personal commitments to recycling and green shopping, socially untenable choices between jobs and the environment, or broad appeals to corporations, political policy-makers, and the scientific establishment--the very interests most responsible for the current ecological mess. ~ John Bellamy Foster

It is a mistake," he said, " to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort. We know that well enough from our experience in the environmental crisis of the twentieth century. Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not cause cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines. ~ Isaac Asimov

The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it. ~ Barry Commoner

I believe that climate change is the great global crisis that we face, environmental crisis. I believe that if you're serious about climate change, you don't encourage the excavation and transportation of very dirty oil. ~ Bernie Sanders

If we had kept the vision of interconnectedness, we would not have created the kind of environmental crisis facing the world today. ~ Satish Kumar

If people see how we're all interconnected and connected with Nature, we wouldn't have an environmental crisis, we wouldn't have two dozen wars all over the world. ~ Stanley Krippner

I didn't want to hear the usual answers about what's wrong because I believe these are symptoms: global warming, genocide, hunger, poverty, war, environmental crisis. If we can identify the root cause, we can change our ways. ~ Tom Shadyac

Despite the mountain of gold that has been built downtown, Los Angeles remains vulnerable to the same explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight that made the early 1990s its worth crisis period since the early Depression. ~ Mike Davis

Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to over-all improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis is a warning that we have delayed nearly too long. ~ Barry Commoner

The problem the world faces today is that only one-third of the world's population lives in decent circumstances, while half the population of the world lives on one or two dollars a day. And even as we have this poverty and backwardness, we are facing a global environmental crisis. We need developmental models that will take into account the specific and unique position of each country and at the same time will address the environmental crisis. ~ Mikhail Gorbachev

However it is achieved, a thorough reorganisation of production, consumption and distribution will be the end result of humanity's response to the climate emergency and the broader environmental crisis. ~ Walden Bello

The more deeply I search for the roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual ... what other word describes the collection of values and assumptions that determine our basic understanding of how we fit into the universe? ~ Al Gore

The environmental crisis is all a result of rushing. ~ Ed Begley, Jr.

We are facing a tipping point of environmental crisis unprecedented in human history and our very survival is dependent on protecting nature. ~ Leonardo DiCaprio

For those who want to understand the issues of the environmental crisis, Encounters with the Archdruid is a superb book. McPhee reveals more nuances of the value revolution that dominates the new age of ecology than most writers could pack into a volume twice as long. I marvel at his capacity to listen intently and extract the essence of a man and his philosophy in the fewest possible words. ~ Stewart Udall

The environmental crisis is fundamentally a spiritual crisis. ~ Thomas Berry

The 'environmental crisis' has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of 'raw materials,' and that we may safely possess those materials by taking them ... And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as 'environmental' problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them. ~ Wendell Berry

Perhaps one of the most meaningful ways to sense the impact of the environmental crisis is to confront the question which is always asked about Lake Erie: how can we restore it? I believe the only valid answer is that no one knows. For it should be clear that even if overnight all of the pollutants now pouring into Lake Erie were stopped, there would still remain the problem of the accumulated mass of pollutants in the lake bottom. ~ Barry Commoner

It is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an 'environmental crisis' because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, god-given world. ~ Wendell Berry

The "environmental crisis," in fact, can be
solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take back into their own power a significant portion of their economic responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the "environmental crisis" is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an "environmental crisis" because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, the god-given world. ~ Wendell Berry

I believe the key to solving everything from individual problems to the global environmental crisis or political and religious conflicts is to be found in restoring this link with the great life force. By recovering our natural healing ability and the goodness of human nature, we can create a truly peaceful, sustainable world. And I don't believe that these are things that social institutions or prestigious experts can do for us: they must happen within each and every one of us. ~ Ilchi Lee

The environmental crisis has deep spiritual, philosophical, and religious roots and causes. It is not merely the result of bad engineering. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies. ~ Scott Westerfeld

A strong player, which has the sufficient critical mass, can withhold pressure better and create a more stable environment that benefits shareholders as well as employees. ~ Lakshmi Mittal

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 seems to me like Mother Nature's mercy and forgiveness have run dry, as we ceaselessly abuse her and take her for granted in order for us to continue our addiction to using fossil fuels. I've gotta say, I don't blame her. Not one bit. ~ Gloria Reuben

Crises are part of life. Everybody has to face them, and it doesn't make any difference what the crisis is. ~ Jack Nicklaus

Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system. ~ Richard Lamm

Executive compensation dipped during the financial crisis, but it has risen briskly since, and is now higher than it's ever been. ~ Anonymous

Unfortunately, psychologists know much less about how the environment influences a person's personality than is commonly assumed. People often talk as if the environmental effects had been well understood for decades, and the new discovery was that there were genetic effects too. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The area of environmental influences on personality is a morass of unsupported or poorly tested ideas, and, ironically, it is behaviour geneticists who have brought the most progress to the field. The irony is that behaviour genetics was founded in order to discover heritable influences on human behaviour. The methods such studies use, however, also allow us to identify non-genetic influences, and say quite a lot about them. ~ Daniel Nettle

The turning points of lives are not the great moments. The real crises are often concealed in occurrences so trivial in appearance that they pass unobserved. ~ George Washington

President Bush is manufacturing a crisis by suggesting that Social Security is in imminent danger. It is not. ~ Richard Neal

Today, the UK must be the pioneer of a new model of economic change, that integrates social and environmental consideration. This is not just a question of values and moral duty. It is about our economy's capacity to sustain itself ~ David Miliband

Our ancestors, who were able to survive and reproduce under unimaginably harsh environmental circumstances, refined and perfected the human genetic recipe. ~ Mark Sisson

Those who have a lot of money in Greece invest in housing abroad. It's all immoral. The Greek crisis is structural, but also political. ~ Evangelos Venizelos

Our work on light bulbs wasn't an arbitrary mandate. We didn't just pick a standard out of the air, or look for a catchy sounding standard like 25 by 2025 not based in science or feasibility. Instead, we worked with both industry and environmental groups to come up with a standard that made sense and was doable. ~ Fred Upton

Humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest. ~ Lester R. Brown

- so much more opportunity now." Her voice trails off.

"Hurrah for women's lib, eh?"

"The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed."

The apocalyptic word jars my attention.

"What do you mean, doomed?"

She glances at me as if I weren't hanging straight either and says vaguely, "Oh …"

"Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?"

Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different.

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like - like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons.

"Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch."

No answering smile.

"That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a - a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chink ~ James Tiptree Jr.

People are overwhelmed looking up at the Mount Everest of environmental challenges that we face. But you put one foot in front of the other and you recognize that not everyone is Sir Edmund Hillary. ~ Ed Begley, Jr.

I am concerned with social and environmental issues. What rational person is not? But advocacy and art do not mix. Art is a seduction. Good art invites the reader to think and feel deeply and come to his/her own conclusions. ~ T.C. Boyle

What's the use of a fine house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? ~ Henry David Thoreau

Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly-crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets. ~ Sherman Alexie

In creativity the way will be found for subject to pass into object, the identity of subject with object will be restored. All the great creators have foreseen this turning-point. Today, in the depths of culture itself and in all its separate spheres, this crisis of creativity is ripening. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev

We need to live not just for ourselves, but for the whole humanity, for the trees, birds and all the living beings. Plastic pollution free living is the easiest way to make that successful. ~ Amit Ray

I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags. ~ W.S. Merwin

It is one of the issues that will have to be worked through however let me make the point and I think anyone would accept that if you set it up properly, not only will you get better environmental outcomes, you have a chance to create more wealth with the available resource. ~ John Anderson

Future generations are not going to ask us what political party were you in. They are going to ask what did you do about it, when you knew the glaciers were melting. ~ Martin Sheen

When this crisis began, crucial decisions about what would happen to some of the world's biggest companies-companies employing tens of thousands of people and holding trillions of dollars in assets-took place in emergency meetings in the middle of the night. We should not be forced to choose between allowing a company to fall into a rapid and chaotic dissolution or to support the company with taxpayer money. That is unacceptable. ~ Barack Obama

Confidence is not about being self-centered. It's about being emotionally centered, so you can better see other people. ~ Karen C. Eddington

In 1995 Bank of America issued a famous report on sprawl in California. The bank pronounced: 'Urban job centers have decentralized to the suburbs. New housing tracts have moved even deeper into agriculturally and environmentally sensitive areas. Private auto use continues to rise. This acceleration of sprawl has surfaced enormous social, environmental, and economic costs, which until now have been hidden, ignored, or quietly borne by society. ~ Dolores Hayden

Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio. ~ Thomas Malthus

I don't think there is such a definition of a perfect family, but I do think that our marriages are in crisis. Our families are in crisis. And I think the African-American family is at one of the worst stages it's been at in a very long time in this country. Fatherlessness is rampant. ~ Leah Ward Sears

Additional federal studies are under way to see if any contamination reaches taps or ground water used for drinking, but the program under which they are conducted, the toxic substances hydrology program of the geological survey, is slated to be eliminated under budget cuts proposed by the Bush administration, government officials said ... estrogens and similar compounds are increasingly the focus of research by the Environmental Protection Agency and many scientists because of hints that they alter sexual characteristics in fish and other aquatic species. ~ Andrew Revkin

Every deadline was a crisis ... No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland ... On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple and basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

We excel in cut-and-paste solutions. We make promises and provide quick fixes to tide over the crisis at hand, thereby abandoning long-term objectives. We also seem to keep widening the threshold of our tolerance. We see enormous wrong, abysmally high levels of corruption, but accept these as necessary evils and refuse to raise a voice against them. We need to ask ourselves not only why we choose to live with mediocrity, but also when we plan to stand up and say, enough is enough. I daresay - and I am relieved to see this in my lifetime - such change is on its way; we see welcome signs, particularly from GenNext. ~ Vinod Rai

The civilization you sit in ... is now obvious in crisis, perhaps death pangs, twisting grotesquely like a dying animal, swirling down the garbage drain-this civilization was founded on God's road map. ~ Peter Kreeft

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

I don't know what kind of sexual crisis you're having right now, like, four years after it would have been useful, but, well. I'm not saying what we did in high school makes you gay or bi or whatever, but I can tell you I'm gay, and that even though I acted like what we were doing wasn't gay back then, it super was." He sighs. "Does that help, Alex? My Bloody Mary is here, and I need it to talk about this phone call. ~ Casey McQuiston

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art. ~ Barry Commoner

I do think that there is a real crisis of masculinity that's happening in America. I think the problem is - the way it's being framed is that there's a problem with masculinity because women are too powerful, or women are taking up too much space. ~ Jessica Valenti

The ability to be cool, confident, and decisive in crisis is not an inherited characteristic but is the direct result of how well the individual has prepared himself for the battle. ~ Richard M. Nixon

If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees. ~ Susan George

Environmental history was ... born out of a moral purpose, with strong political commitments behind it, but also became, as it matured, a scholarly enterprise that had neither any simple, nor any single, moral or political agenda to promote. Its principal goal became one of deepening our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time and, conversely, how they have affected that environment and with what results. ~ Donald Worster

The key to overcome crisis is patience, courage, self-discipline, adaptation and alertness. ~ Amit Ray

You know you've officially hit a midlife crisis when you finally start feeling like you have your life together and your body starts falling apart! ~ Tanya Masse

What we have to realize is that we are part of the crisis, and we are determining the outcome; our actions, at a personal level as well as a planetary level, are part of the solution. If we do nothing then disaster could be the final outcome. ~ Ernesto Ortiz

Insurrections, rioting, mass expropriations, occupations, and all sorts of unimaginable forms of class warfare are not only inevitable but also are taking place all over with more frequency and veraciousness as the crisis that is capitalism deepens.

It is crystal clear that the deprived, exploited, and violated have organized, and will continue to do so, formally and informally, to the demise of their oppressors, those who remain neutral, or each other.

The side of history on which we find ourselves is not determined by whether or not we share the experiences of one horror or another, or how we individually identify, but instead on our own resolution to see the end of each of these miseries that perpetuate this racist, capitalist, shit show called society.

We Are All Oscar Grant(?): Attacking White Supremacy in the Rebellions and Beyond ~ Finn Feinberg

I wrote seven Myron Bolitar novels in a row, and I never want to write a Myron book where he just solves a crime. Every one of them I want to be personal, and I want him to grow and change. The problem with that is, it makes the series limited, you can't write a series where a guy is always going through some kind of crisis. ~ Harlan Coben

Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed. ~ Tim Ingold

In 'Sidney's Comet,' thanks to all the consumerism, all the garbage had to be put in deep space, even though we're not supposed to litter the cosmos - that was an environmental message. Although it was funny, it had an important message. ~ Brian Herbert

The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade and investment. ~ Ralph Nader

In the 1890's horses, carrying people to work, dropped 4.5 million tons of manure on the streets of Manhattan, every year. That was the big environmental problem of the day. "NYC will be buried in horse manure by 1950!" screamed the headlines. It doesn't matter what your opinion about this was. None of the people living in NY solved the problem despite the 1000s of opinions. People with passion for mechanics in Detroit made something called a car. Problem solved. ~ James Altucher