Environmental Problems Quotes

Our ingenuity in feeding ourselves is prodigious, but at various points our technologies come into conflict with nature's ways of doing things, as when we seek to maximize efficiency by planting crops or raising animals in vast mono-cultures. This is something nature never does, always and for good reasons practicing diversity instead. A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. ~ Michael Pollan

A great paradox...red states are poorere and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment....The gap in life expectancey between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the U.S. and Nicaragua....And the problem transcends race; an average black in Maryland lives four years longer, earns twice as much, and is twice as likely to have a college degree as a black in Louisiana. And whites in Louisiana are wrose off than whites in Maryland or anywhere else outside Mississippi. Louisiana has suffered many environmental problems too: there are nearly 400 miles of low, flat, subsiding coastline, adn the state loses a football field-size patch of wetland every hour. It is threatened by rising sea levels and severe hurricanes, which the world's top scientists connect to climate change. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

The oceans are in trouble. There are some serious problems out there that I believe are not clear to many people. My hope is to continually find new ways of creating images and stories that both celebrate the sea yet also highlight environmental problems. Photography can be a powerful instrument for change. ~ Brian Skerry

Environmental problems are really social problems anyway. They begin with people as the cause and end with people as the victims ~ Edmund Hillary

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

Today when the public thinks of the products of science it is likely to think about environmental problems, an unproductive armament industry, careless or dishonest 'scientific' reports, Livermore cheers for 'nukes forever' and a huge amount of self-serving noise on every subject from global warming to 'the face of God'. ~ Leo Kadanoff

In many areas, too, people are having to deal with environmental problems and, with these, threats to their livelihood and worse. At the same time, many others are struggling t get by in the face of inequality, corruption, and injustice. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

When we go to the store, we bring home more than food - we bring home traces of broader environmental problems. But we can use our shopping carts and dinner plates to help solve some of those problems. ~ Frances Beinecke

We line up and make a lot of noise about big environmental problems like incinerators, waste dumps, acid rain, global warming and pollution. But we don't understand that when we add up all the tiny environmental problems each of us creates, we end up with those big environmental dilemmas. Humans are content to blame someone else, like government or corporations, for the messes we create, and yet we each continue doing the same things, day in and day out, that have created the problems. Sure, corporations create pollution. If they do, don't buy their products. If you have to buy their products (gasoline for example), keep it to a minimum. Sure, municipal waste incinerators pollute the air. Stop throwing trash away. Minimize your production of waste. Recycle. Buy food in bulk and avoid packaging waste. Simplify. Turn off your TV. Grow your own food. Make compost. Plant a garden. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If you don't, who will? ~ Joseph Jenkins

On almost every environmental issue I care about, in fact, I've been wrong at one point or another. I used to think that climate change was no big deal, that most environmental problems were massive exaggerations, that oil reserves were effectively unlimited, and more. ~ Ramez Naam

GM has never been about feeding the world or tackling environmental problems. It is and has always been about control of the global food economy by a tiny handful of giant corporations. It's not wicked to question that process. It is wicked not to. ~ Zac Goldsmith

There are more effective ways of tackling environmental problems including global warming, proliferation of plastics, urban sprawl, and the loss of biodiversity than by treaties, top-down regulations, and other approaches offered by big governments and their dependents. ~ Preston Manning

The environmental problems of developing countries are not the side effects of excessive industrialisation but reflect the inadequacy of development. ~ Indira Gandhi

I think environmentalists do no service to their cause by taking fundamentalist stances. I am not defending corporate India's track record, but for many environmental problems, there are technological solutions. ~ Jairam Ramesh

The Earth faces environmental problems right now that threaten the imminent destruction of civilization and the end of the planet as a livable world. Humanity cannot afford to waste its financial and emotional resources on endless, meaningless quarrels between each group and all others. there must be a sense of globalism in which the world unites to solve the real problems that face all groups alike. ~ Isaac Asimov

We know it (meat eating) is indisputably the number one cause of global warming. So what does it mean exactly to be an environmentalist on a daily basis if you are not thinking about the number one cause of global warming or one of the top two or three causes of all other environmental problems? Does it mean you are necessarily someone who doesn't care about the environment? Obviously not, but it might mean you have a blind spot for something big. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

The rich and powerful are going to survive longer, but the effects are very real―and they're getting worse very quickly as more and more people get marginalized because they play no role in profit-making, which is considered the only human value. Well, the environmental problems are simply much more significant in scale than anything else in the past. And there's a fair possibility―certainly a possibility high enough so that no rational person would exclude it―that within a couple hundred years the world's water-level will have risen to the point that most of human life will have been destroyed. ~ Noam Chomsky

We got everyone's attention, but we didn't solve any environmental problems. ~ Denis Hayes

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.

All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology. There is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that it previously produced. ~ Jared Diamond

Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial. ~ Kalle Lasn

The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters ... and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult. ~ Jacques-Yves Cousteau

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems. ~ James Fallows

When I look at China's environmental problems, the real barrier is not lack of technology or money. It's lack of motivation. ~ Ma Jun

Those who nod sagely and quote the tragedy of the commons in relation to environmental problems from pollution of the atmosphere to poaching of national parks tend to forget that Garrett Hardin revised his conclusions many times over thirty years. He recognized, most importantly, that anarchy did not prevail on the common pastures of midieval England in the way he had described [in his 1968 essay in 'Science']. The commoners--usually a limited number of people with defined rights in law--organized themselves to ensure it did not. The pastures were protected from ruin by the tradition of 'stinting,' which limited each herdsman to a fixed number of animals. 'A managed commons, though it may have other defects, is not automatically subject to the tragic fate of the unmanaged commons,' wrote Hardin, though he was still clearly unhappy with commoning arrangements. As with all forms of socialism, of which he regarded commoning as an early kind, Hardin said the flaw in the system lay in the quality of the management. The problem was alays how to prevent the managers from furthering their own interests. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guardians?

Hardin observed, crucially, that a successful managed common depended on limiting the numbers of commoners, limiting access, and having penalties that deterred.
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None of Hardin's requirements for a successfully managed common is fulfilled by high-seas fishery regimes ~ Charles Clover

Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of "grow or die," is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame technology as such or population growth as such for environmental problems. We will ignore their root causes, such as trade for profit, industrial expansion, and the identification of "progress" with corporate self-interest. In short, we will tend to focus on the symptoms of a grim social pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and our efforts will be directed toward limited goals whose attainment is more cosmetic than curative. ~ Murray Bookchin

Our nation's continued prosperity hinges on our ability to solve environmental problems and sustain the natural resources on which we all depend. ~ John McCain

This is where the will to grapple with our hard and pressing environmental problems begins: in relationship to something other that you love beyond any utility, beyond any logic. ~ Susan Freinkel

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

The accusation is made without reference to the true nature of the situation. Environmental problems of delinquency are interpreted as evidence of racial criminality. Crises arising in Northern schools are interpreted as proofs that Negroes are inherently delinquent. The extremists do not recognize that these school problems are symptoms of urban dislocation, rather than expressions of racial deficiency. Criminality and delinquency are not racial; poverty and ignorance breed crime whatever the racial group may be. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation. There is no limit to where our engagement with death can take us. ~ Caitlin Doughty

Menaced by environmental problems, torn by struggles between the tiny coterie of wealthy Spaniards at the center and a teeming, fractious polyglot periphery, battered by a corrupt and inept civic and religious establishment, troubled by a past that it barely understood - to the contemporary eye, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City looks oddly familiar. In its dystopic way, it was an amazingly contemporary place, unlike any other then on the planet. It was the first twenty-first-century city, the first of today's modern, globalized megalopolises. ~ Charles C. Mann

As a consumer an individual expresses "personal or self-regarding wants and interests"; as a citizen she expresses her "judgements about what is right or good". The mistake of market approaches to environmental problems is that they transform an issue that requires public deliberation by citizens into one to be resolved by consumer preferences. The market responds only to those preferences that can be articulated through acts of buying and selling. Hence the interests of the commercially inarticulate, both those who are contingently so (the poor) and those who are necessarily so (future generations and non-humans) cannot be adequately represented. ~ John O'Neill

There is probably a high percentage of Native Americans as well as non-Indians who feel that participating in this greater American economy that you mentioned is and has become a recipe for disaster in the long term, because the response to social and environmental problems has been responded to with a drug mentality, which is to say, anything for the quick fix. And it has trained the public to always believe they are one purchase away from happiness. ~ Leonard Peltier

The destruction of aquatic ecosystem health, and the increasing water scarcity, are in my opinion the most pressing environmental problems facing human kind. ~ Maude Barlow

If man has not found ways to deal with environmental problems such as water and air pollution by 1998, it will be too late. The future is not determined and it lies in our own hands. ~ Margaret Mead

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

Factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems. The meat industry causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, planes and ships in the world. ~ Joan Jett

Writing and learning to write in our particular historical period is more important than ever. We are catapulting ourselves toward what is a serious dilemma in the future of humanity and the world. If we don't write ourselves out of it and figure out a way of solving environmental problems, we'll have nothing. ~ Margo Taft Stever

An environmental revolution is taking shape in the United States. This revolution has touched communities of color from New York to California and from Florida to Alaska - anywhere where African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans live and comprise a majority of the population. Collectively, these Americans represent the fastest growing segment of the population in the United States. They are also the groups most at risk from environmental problems. ~ Robert D Bullard

I think an old style of addressing environmental problems is ebbing, but the rise of the so-called conservative, political movement in this country is not a trend towards the future but a reaction to this very broad shift that we are undergoing. ~ Paul Hawken

The Earth should not be cut up into hundreds of different sections, each inhabited by a self-defined segment of humanity that considers its own welfare and its own "national security" to be paramount above all other consideration.

I am all for cultural diversity and would be willing to see each recognizable group value its cultural heritage. I am a New York patriot, for instance, and if I lived in Los Angeles, I would love to get together with other New York expatriates and sing "Give My Regards to Broadway."

This sort of thing, however, should remain cultural and benign. I'm against it if it means that each group despises others and lusts to wipe them out. I'm against arming each little self-defined group with weapons with which to enforce its own prides and prejudices.

The Earth faces environmental problems right now that threaten the imminent destruction of civilization and the end of the planet as a livable world. Humanity cannot afford to waste its financial and emotional resources on endless, meaningless quarrels between each group and all others. there must be a sense of globalism in which the world unites to solve the real problems that face all groups alike.

Can that be done? The question is equivalent to: Can humanity survive?

I am not a Zionist, then, because I don't believe in nations, and because Zionism merely sets up one more nation to trouble the world. It sets up one more nation to have "rights" and "dema ~ Isaac Asimov

Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works. ~ George Monbiot

Not necessary that every problem has a solution, you have to live with 'some' problems..rather than forcing a solution and doing a blunder, live with it.. People always have solutions for 'your' problems but none for their own.. ~ Honeya

A million years is a short time - the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet's time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth. ~ John McPhee

To get our economy back on track and keep it functioning properly without the problems of our financial institutions, we need reasonable regulations that will protect Main Street while at the same time allow Wall Street to do what it does best - make money for American investors. ~ Marsha Blackburn

We are all drawn to problems and solving problems. Joy doesn't demand our time. So we have to mark that time on our schedules. That's the only way you are going to get it. Five minutes, three times a day in your schedule. That's doable. ~ Bonnie St. John

The love of nature is the love for the Creator. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I like to go out there looking like a strong woman, because I am strong. But I am also a woman who goes through all kinds of problems and highs and lows. ~ Katy Perry

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation. ~ Douglas Coupland

A majority of American citizens are now becoming skeptical of the claim that our carbon footprints, resulting from our use of fossil fuels, are going to lead to climatic calamities. But governments are not yet listening to the citizens. ~ John Coleman

I need you to be clever, Bean. I need you to think of solutions to problems we haven't seen yet. I want you to try things that no one has ever tried because they're absolutely stupid. ~ Orson Scott Card

The most important movement in the world is the feminist movement. If we can really figure out what's going on between men and women, the other problems will take care of themselves. I'm sure of it. ~ Utah Phillips

Overcome your problems as they arise. Do not live in fear of the next bad thing in your life. Enjoy your time now and trust that you have the strength to defeat every problem that comes your way in the future. ~ Avina Celeste

Even if states sometimes have problems with each other, arts and sports should not suffer from that. Arts and sports are there to bring the people together - and not to divide them. ~ Vladimir Putin

Humor gives presidents the chance to be seen as warm, relaxed persons. Humor reaches out and puts its arm around the listener and says, 'I am one of you, I understand,' and implicitly it promises, 'I will do something about your problems. ~ Robert Orben

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. ~ Richard Hamming

There's a lot of films that have relatively rigid road maps because they have a script and others that are less rigid because they have less of a script, like 'Elephant.' The road map becomes more interpretive, maybe, than one with a detailed script. Editing-wise, they all have their problems. ~ Gus Van Sant

The second kind are invited by bad character, and the problems such a person has then cannot be put right until he puts himself right. It is not something a proud man can do, because proud men see no wrongness in themselves. ~ John C. Wright

Try to overcome your doubt. Believe you are beautiful. Look at yourself through someone else's green eyes. Believe someone out there will find you and kiss your skin until you can feel it blister with the heat. Believe in something bigger than your problems and you will be saved. ~ Max Bemis

Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.

This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.

This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency. ~ Peter Joseph

The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I think a lot of people may have a unique insight or some idea that they feel could be a great solution for a particular problem, but for some reason never have a chance to try or never have the courage or maybe the self-doubt. Really, it's best just to remain naive and continue to work on things and see if people have the same problems. ~ Chad Hurley

Philanthropreneurship can be described as the emerging practice of bringing social change in new and creative ways. This practice includes the financial aspect as well as the social aspect. The core idea of philanthropreneurship is about the skills which enable people to make others fortunes by working with startups and giving back. These are often the ones required to solve almost all the intractable problems. ~ Aman Mehndiratta

Every time you see your belly button, remember that your life is connected with the life of the planet, ~ Ilchi Lee

I'm sad that it's uncool or offensive to talk about environmental or human rights issues. ~ Grimes

From night problems we learned one lasting lesson: when a map and a compass come into contact with a second lieutenant, prepare yourself for confusion. Throughout, ~ Robert Leckie

A heart has problems which mind cannot understand. ~ Santosh Kalwar

We are besieged by simple problems.... Checklists can provide protection ~ Atul Gawande

I am going to confront the old-fashioned negative thinking which says that all government needs to do to generate growth is cut worker and environmental protections, cut taxes on the rich and stroke 'fat cats' until they purr with pleasure. I'm completely repudiating the idea that government has to get out of the way. ~ Vince Cable

A creative mind craves for more knowledge and it desires to solve problems for others. ~ Euginia Herlihy

Humans need simple answers for complex problems. ~ Lawrence J. Hirsch

Inner silence promotes clarity of mind; It makes us value the inner world; It trains us to go inside to the source of peace and inspiration when we are faced with problems and challenges. ~ Deepak Chopra

The ordinary operations of algebra suffice to resolve problems in the theory of curves. ~ Joseph-Louis Lagrange

As much as 95% of quality related problems in the factory can be solved with seven fundamental quantitative tools. ~ Kaoru Ishikawa

Cooking was not a chore for Tengo. He always used it as a time to think - about everyday problems, about math problems, about his writing, or about metaphysical propositions. He could think in a more orderly fashion while standing in the kitchen and moving his hands than while doing nothing. ~ Haruki Murakami

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems. ~ Elie Wiesel

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

Single-purposism, as we have seen, tends to create projects that harm the environment. Instead, we should design projects with as favourable an environmental impact as possible. This is the objective of environmental impact design. ~ Tom Turner