Environmental Degradation Quotes

Extinction, the irrevocable loss of a species, causes pain that can never find relief. It is an ache that will pass from generation to generation for the rest of human history. ~ Callum Roberts

More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or "externalize" such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

People are looking for someone to blame. Our heritage comes from two groups who always denied that they were part of the problem. The early ecologists blamed industrialization for environmental degradation even while they continued to purchase all the goods and services produced by industry. And the forerunners of the parashintos always looked down on and isolated strangers. ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

But the sun itself, however beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering more death than life. So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the thing it looks upon to bless. ~ Charles Dickens

ethanol may actually make some kinds of air pollution worse. It evaporates faster than pure gasoline, contributing to ozone problems in hot temperatures. A 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that ethanol does reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 12 percent relative to gasoline, but it calculated that devoting the entire U.S. corn crop to make ethanol would replace only a small fraction of American gasoline consumption. Corn farming also contributes to environmental degradation due to runoff from fertilizer and pesticides.
But to dwell on the science is to miss the point. As the New York Times noted in the throes of the 2000 presidential race, ―Regardless of whether ethanol is a great fuel for cars, it certainly works wonders in Iowa campaigns. The ethanol tax subsidy increases the demand for corn, which puts money in farmers' pockets. Just before the Iowa caucuses, corn farmer Marvin Flier told the Times, ―Sometimes I think [the candidates] just come out and pander to us, he said. Then he added, ―Of course, that may not be the worst thing. The National Corn Growers Association figures that the ethanol program increases the demand for corn, which adds 30 cents to the price of every bushel sold.
Bill Bradley opposed the ethanol subsidy during his three terms as a senator from New Jersey (not a big corn-growing state). Indeed, some of his most important accomplishments as a senator involved purging the tax code of subsid ~ Charles Wheelan

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

The love for God is the love to protect the environment. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

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

Cutting a tree down doesn't kill it; it erases it from history. ~ The Wombat

Make no mistake. The greatest destroyer of ecology. The greatest source of waste, depletion and pollution. The greatest purveyor of violence, war, crime, poverty, animal abuse and inhumanity. The greatest generator of personal and social neurosis, mental disorders, depression, anxiety. Not to mention the greatest source of social paralysis, stopping us from moving into new methodologies for personal health, global sustainability and progress on this planet, is not some corrupt government or legislation.
Not some rogue corporation or banking cartel.
Not some flaw of human nature and not some secret cabal that controls the world.
It is the socioeconomic system itself at its very foundation. ~ Peter Joseph

They listened to the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, heard the horns of Elfland, and made designs on the culture that our own age is only beginning fully to appreciate. They were philologists and philomyths: lovers of logos (the ordering power of words) and mythos (the regenerative power of story), with a nostalgia for things medieval and archaic and a distrust of technological innovation that never decayed into the merely antiquarian. Out of the texts they studied and the tales they read, they forged new ways to convey old themes - sin and salvation, despair and hope, friendship and loss, fate and free will - in a time of war, environmental degradation, and social change. ~ Philip Zaleski

The city is dirty due to the laziness of the citizens in the country. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

In Kenya women are the first victims of environmental degradation, because they are the ones who walk for hours looking for water, who fetch firewood, who provide food for their families. ~ Wangari Maathai

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

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

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

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

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

A very large percentage of illnesses are the expressions of inadequate responses to the environment. ~ Rene Dubos

Unless government appropriately regulates oil developments and holds oil executives accountable, the public will not trust them to drill, baby, drill. And we must! ~ Sarah Palin

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

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency - issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights - the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious. ~ Gregory S. Paul

Among the world's evils - fascism, ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation - smoking deserves the most severe curricular attention in my kids' school. ~ Jess Walter

The signs accumulated. But I did not respond. I would not wake up. We will not wake up. This terrifying sleep of denial. Is it an underlying belief that we as a human species are not worth it? Do we secretly feel we have lost our right to be here in all our selfishness and stupidity, our cruelty and greed? ~ Eve Ensler

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

On what reasonable grounds would sincere, informed environmentalists refuse to join animal advocates in a campaign to protect increasingly threatened fish populations from the snapping teeth of humanity? ~ Lisa Kemmerer

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

To love is to willingly lower our defenses, a terrifying prospect any time and place but especially so at a time and in a place where we perceive ourselves as having so much (HIV; violence; social; cultural; environmental degradation) to defend ourselves against. To love is to give oneself to another, to entrust to someone else a power that all good sense would have us reserve to ourselves. So we give away some part of ourselves, to find that part returned to us tenfold, in ways we could never have predicted and cannot rationally understand. Loaves and fishes. Miracles happen. ~ Fenton Johnson

Cattle grazing on public lands is heavily subsidized by the federal government, so yes, all of us taxpayers are helping to pay for tremendous environmental degradation. ~ Mary Ellen Hannibal

Living in filth is dark doom. The light of awaken leads to cleanliness. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

These three conceptual and ideological challenges (Hindu fundamentalism, Communist dictatorship and ethnic separatism) all date to the founding of the nation. To these have, more recently been added, three more mundane and materialist challenges. These are inequality, corruption and environmental degradation. ~ Ramachandra Guha

If we deny climate change and don't care about environmental degradation; we are no more than those people who are willing to be stupid because someone else was stupid in the past. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

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

Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it? ~ Joy Williams

We loved our homeland for thousands of years which cost us climate change and environmental degradation because we were too selfish to care about the nature, now it is time that we must love our world at least for a little time. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

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

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

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

Humanity is at a crossroads. We can continue down the current path of greed, consumerism, oligarchy, poverty, war, racism, and environmental degradation. Or we can lead the world in moving in a very different direction. ~ Bernie Sanders

Without environmental sustainability, economic stability and social cohesion cannot be achieved ~ Phil Harding

I hope my work contributes to understanding long-term patterns of human behavior and how we survive, thrive, or fail during times of environmental, social, and economic crisis. ~ Sarah Parcak

Nature is the time-vesture of God that reveals Him to the wise, and hides him from the foolish. ~ Thomas Carlyle

You completely rediscovered & relived everything to do with wildlife. ~ Terri Irwin

For an entire year he saved all of his trash. Except for what he actually ate, everything was sorted into bins. At year's end, his living room and kitchen were filled with nearly a hundred cubic feet of stuff. Some was compostable. But the vast majority was leftover food packaging. Derfel's experimentation shows what happens when someone intentionally holds onto everything. The point of his exercise was to raise consciousness about the environmental impact of one individual's consumer waste. At another level, it demonstrates that we readily discard most of what passes though daily life as useless trash. ~ Richard J. Borden

People often talk about the pain and degradation of being bullied. No one really talks about the cost. Not that money is more important than those other things, but having to pay the expenses of your own humiliation just rubbed rock salt into the wound. ~ Lish McBride

Sacred spaces can be created in any environment. ~ Christy Turlington

More and more, paddling the Yellowstone feels like that bedside visit, like we are attending to a friend in dire straits, a friend whom we have seen in the full bloom of health, but with whom, now, there is little to say and only our companionship to offer. ~ Alan S. Kesselheim

The transformation of forests into deserts, fertile earth into sunbaked concrete, and running rivers into silted floodwaters show that only through care for the environment can the livelihoods of those most dependent on it be sustained. We cannot allow economic and environmental concerns to be played off against each other. ~ Petra Kelly

Let me start by emphasizing that I am open to efforts to expedite environmental procedures for true emergencies or in other clear cases where current laws are needlessly burdensome. ~ Sherwood Boehlert

Man the law-giver will have to pay a dreadful penalty for the degradation he has imposed upon the so called weaker sex. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

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

One of the best ways to properly evaluate and adapt to the many environmental stresses of life is to simply view them as normal. The adversity and failures in our lives, if adapted to and viewed as normal corrective feedback to use to get back on target, serve to develop in us an immunity against anxiety, depression, and the adverse responses to stress. Instead of tackling the most important priorities that would make us successful and effective in life, we prefer the path of least resistance and do things simply that will relieve our tension, such as shuffling papers and majoring in minors. ~ Denis Waitley

They were bound together by a tie which angels may not blush to approve. A man who can attach to him a woman however base in heart and corrupt in life, is not all bad. A woman who can maintain her trust, who can waste her money like water to stand by her friend, amid the darkest clouds that can gather, that woman cannot be all evil. And if in vice, and degradation, and pollution, and infamy, she rises so far above it all as to vindicate her original nature, I must confess that I honor this trait most of all. ~ Phillip Margulies

While the rich reap most of the benefits of technological development, the poor bear an unequal burden of dealing with the consequences of the resulting increased pollution. The poor continue to live in greatest proximity to the sources of pollution, the infrastructure and machinery of industry. They work in the most polluted and physically dangerous workplaces. And these same individuals, living and working closest to the sources of environmental catastrophe, are also the ones most lacking decent health care. ~ James H. Cone

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

Restoration ecology is experimental science, a science of love and altruism. In its attempts to reverse the processes of ecosystem degradation it runs exactly counter to the market system, to land speculation, to the whole cultural attitude of regarding the Earth as commodity rather than community. It is a soft-souled science. ~ Stephanie Mills

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"

The race of mankind would perish did they cease to aid each other. We cannot exist without mutual help. All therefore that need aid have a right to ask it from their fellow-men; and no one who has the power of granting can refuse it without guilt. ~ Walter Scott

Instant-doomsday hyperbole caused the world's attention to focus on the hypothetical threat of global warming to the exclusion of environmental menaces that are real, palpable, and awful right now. ~ Gregg Easterbrook

Life Is an Ambiguous Stimulus

In a very real sense, life is an ambiguous stimulus. Does survival of a heart attack indicate that death is imminent or that one has been given a new lease on life? Is falling in love an assurance of a lifelong partnership or the first sign of an inevitable heartbreak? Many human situations are complex and their meanings subtle. Thus, to make sense of and gain agency over our experiences, we engage in the process of self-reflection.
Through self-reflection, people come to realize that their lives are filled with uncertainty about their own identities, their relationships with others, and their environmental circumstances. Because living involves adaptation to irregular changes and perturbations from the environment, the process of self-reflection reveals the indefinite nature of life. The uncertainty stemming from threatening stimuli whose nature is unknown or unpredictable evokes stress and a sense of loss of control. In response to uncertainty, we are driven to make meaning of our experiences and in so doing to reduce uncertainty. Indeed, a series of cunning experiments demonstrated that the sense of lacking control promotes illusory pattern perception in ambiguous situations. Hence, people consciously or unconsciously attempt to regain a sense of control by projecting patterns onto the chaos of their lives. This meaning-making process hinged on the appraisal of stressors and their meaningful integration into our autobiographica ~ Todd Kashdan

Wealth and vegetation go together, and that exacerbates environmental injustice. The poor bear the burden of degraded environments. ~ Natalie Jeremijenko

To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Because past environmental destruction was the result of ignorance, we can easily forgive it. Today, we are better informed. Therefore, it's essential that we make an ethical examination of what we have inherited, what we are responsible for, and what we will pass on to coming generations. Ours is clearly a pivotal generation. We have global communication and yet confrontation is more common than dialogue. ~ Dalai Lama

These proven positive consequences of elevated CO2 are infinitely more important than the unsubstantiated predictions of apocalypse that are hypothesized to result from global warming, which itself, may not be occurring from rising atmospheric CO2 levels. The aerial fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment is the only aspect of global environmental change about which we can be certain; and to restrict CO2 emissions is to assuredly deny the biosphere the many benefits that accrue from this phenomenon. ~ Keith E. Idso

I'm not out there suggesting that we should ban every plastic product. But there are some whose environmental costs exceed their utility, and the [plastic] bag is one of them. ~ Susan Freinkel

No man should think himself a zero, and think he can do nothing about the state of the world. ~ Bernard Baruch

In the future, every industry should be an environmental industry. In a world where energy and carbon emissions are constrained, every business must take resource productivity seriously ~ David Miliband

As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do construct a mountain from molehills or other over-codified facts. If only the cities had been dynamited before it was too late for him! -- That Pol Pot sure had the right idea, blowing down those ticky-tacky rice paper offices and illuminating the middlemen with bullets of vanguardist light so everyone could get back to the country, don't you think? -- As things stood, even had Bug been able to cover the earth again with forests, after having lived so long in the excremental piles of cement and rusted steel he never could have seen trees as more than tedious identical dirty giant toothpicks unfit to be taken into the mouth' his summer camp, as a dishwasher jail where you breathed in the steam of bad food; and the islands to which he had rowed, as sad unwholesome protuberances, polyps and land-cancers still in the stink of the outhouse -- and all the girls had long since grown up completely to make travesties of their lives, even though some inherited great riches as we used to reckon riches in those days. -- But surely this change in him was necessary, for without wretchedness and degradation of self one will never accomplish anything. ~ William T. Vollmann

As a group, we want to follow good and green strategy. Setting targets is one element of that. The second part is to design products which meet environmental goals. ~ Jamshyd Godrej

No segment of the population has lost more by the agendas of the liberal constituencies of the Democratic Party than the black population. The teachers' unions, environmental fanatics and the ACLU are just some of the groups to whose interests blacks have been sacrificed wholesale. Lousy education and high crime rates in the ghettos, and unaffordable housing elsewhere with building restrictions, are devastating prices to pay for liberalism. ~ Thomas Sowell

Politicians had always viewed environmental issues as narrow things of no great political consequence. Sort of NIMBY issues. A big part of the reason was that the groups that cared about wilderness didn't talk with the groups that were trying to stop freeways from cutting through inner cities, and neither of them talked to the folks who wanted to stop the military from dumping Agent Orange on Vietnam. ~ Denis Hayes

The choice to 'do nothing' in response to the mounting evidence is actually a choice to continue and even accelerate the reckless environmental destruction that is creating the catastrophe at hand. ~ Al Gore

Our planet has not seen an extinction crisis as serious as the one in progress for 65 million years. ~ David Suzuki

The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures. It weighs the obvious against what in its terms are incomprehensible. When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous-and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It's exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout. ~ Rebecca Solnit

capital flows to wherever the social or environmental standards are lowest. Not only this, but capitalism is designed to create the instability that we have seen in the markets, and those that suffer the most from this volatility are always the most vulnerable, namely the poor of the world. ~ Wayne Visser

Heritability in psychiatric disorders typically involves complex inheritance patterns controlled by multiple genes that interact with environmental factors to produce their results. ~ Joseph E. Ledoux

Trees constitute the environmental quality committee - running air and water purification service 24-7. They're on every task force, from the historical society picnic to the highway department, school board, and library. When it comes to civic beautification, they alone create the crimson fall with little recognition. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

We have a responsibility toward the other life-forms of our planet whose continued existence is threatened by the thoughtless behavior of our own human species. . . . Environmental responsibility – for if there is no God, then, obviously, it is up to us to put things right. ~ Jane Goodall

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

Without education ... what is man but a splendid slave, a reasoning savage vacillating between the dignity of an intelligence derived from God and the degradation of passion participated with brutes ... ~ Chukwudifu Oputa

A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmental damaging consumption patterns. ~ Maurice Strong

A system that has only one goal, the maximization of profits in an endless quest for the accumulation of capital on an ever-ending scale, and which thus seeks to transform every single thing on earth into a community with a price, is a system that is soulless; it can never have a soul, never be green. It can never stand still, but is driven to manipulate and fabricate whims and wants in order to grow and sell more... forever. Nothing is allowed to stand in its path. ~ Fred Magdoff

We should restore a proper balance in environmental regulation and energy production that is based on common sense, not political agendas. ~ Mac Thornberry

Men may dam it and say that they have made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have its way; the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents. ~ Wendell Berry

When we realize we can make a buck cleaning up the environment, it will be done! ~ Dennis Weaver

Ontario's gas tax rebates and infrastructure programs help create sustainable transit to improve quality of life for Ottawa residents with significant environmental benefits. ~ Bob Chiarelli

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

It's worth knowing more about the complicated environmental and genetic factors that could explain why traumatic brain injuries lead to long-term disabilities in some people and not in others. ~ Anne Wojcicki