Natural Environment Quotes

We've built, drilled, and shipped indiscriminately across our oceans, with little consideration for the natural environment that is critical to the health of many of our other ocean uses, like food and recreation. ~ Philippe Cousteau, Jr.

A natural environment is far more complex than any playing field. ~ Richard Louv

The great leap was one from adaptation to, to control over the natural environment. ~ Pierre L. Van Den Berghe

I make photographs and still make photographs of the natural environment. It's a love because that was part of my life before I was involved in photography. ~ John Sexton

There can be no doubt ... of our dependence upon forces beyond our control. Primitive man was so impotent in the face of these forces that g , especially in an unfavorable natural environment, fear became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fear created gods. ~ John Dewey

The Truly Healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating. ~ William H. Stewart

The world's forests are a shared stolen treasure that we must put back for our children's future ~ Desmond Tutu

The natural environment of humans - space stations, ships, constructed habitats. ~ Ann Leckie

The Congress, the Administration and the public all share a profound commitment to the rescue of our natural environment, and the preservation of the Earth as a place both habitable by and hospitable to man. ~ Richard M. Nixon

We want to see ... the efficient production and use of energy, so that the products we produce and the way we produce them pose no threat to the world's natural environment ... economic development ... so that more and more of the world's population can enjoy ... the things which the energy industry supplies ... (and) a society in which ideas and knowledge move freely. ~ John Browne, Baron Browne Of Madingley

Here I would point out, as a symptom equally worthy of notice, the ABSENCE OF FEELING which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. I do not mean that we could not laugh at a person who inspires us with pity, for instance, or even with affection, but in such a case we must, for the moment, put our affection out of court and impose silence upon our pity. In a society composed of pure intelligences there would probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor understand laughter. ~ Henri Bergson

Shallow ecology is anthropocentric, or human-centred. It views humans as above or outside nature, as the source of all value, and ascribes only instrumental, or 'use', value to nature. Deep ecology does not separate humans - or anything else - from the natural environment. It does see the world not as a collection of isolated objects but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology recognizes the intrinsic value of all human beings and views humans as just one particular strand in the web of life. ~ Fritjof Capra

We're busily wrecking the chances for future generations at a rapid rate of knots by not recognizing the damage we're doing to the natural environment, bearing in mind that this is the only planet that we know has any life on it. ~ Prince Charles

An agricultural landscape produces food but it also provides water, requires biodiversity to underpin soil function, pollination and other useful services, and also has value to society in terms of aesthetics and recreation ~ Tim Benton

If there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animalsand plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has has its own balance; is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture? ~ Lewis Mumford

A thing of beauty is a joy forever. ~ John Keats

I live in one of the best places, bar none, to appreciate the wild natural environment. I also live in one of the most politically difficult places to work on its behalf: Alaska. ~ Kate Troll

In terms of making TV drama, not everything has to make sense. In cinema, you usually strive for reality and a natural environment, but in TV, it's more acceptable to do something crazy and break with naturalism. ~ Takashi Miike

The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment. ~ Barry Commoner

Regulation is necessary to protect our natural environment, keep our food and medicine safe, and ensure fair competition and fair treatment of our workers. ~ Marco Rubio

Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. ~ Diane Setterfield

Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end. ~ Remy De Gourmont

Wild roses are fairest, and nature a better gardener than art. ~ Louisa May Alcott

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers. ~ Claude Monet

If you look into the way that materials are used in an ecological system you'll notice that there is no waste. The waste of one organism becomes food for another and everything's recycled in an ecological system whereas in our human built environment there's a throughput system. We use something then we throw it away. We have to imitate nature and try to re-use everything we make as human beings or recycle them - when we cannot re-use or recycle them we should try to reintegrate them back into the natural environment. ~ Ken Yeang

Our societies appear to be intent on immediate consumption rather than on investment for the future. We are piling up enormous debts and exploiting the natural environment in a manner which suggests that we have no real sense of any worthwhile future. Just as a society which believes in the future saves in the present in order to invest in the future, so a society without belief spends everything now and piles up debts for future generations to settle. "Spend now and someone else will pay later." ~ Lesslie Newbigin

How oft a summer shower has started me; to seek the shelter of a hollow tree ~ John Clare

The natural environment is the great outpatient department where we can go for healing ~ William Bird

If we once and for so long lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that's overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of natural anarchy reaches much further into our shared history . ~ John Zerzan

Beauty has undergone a similar process, thanks to advertisers. Evolution gave us a circuit that responds to good looks - call it the pleasure receptor for our visual cortex - and in our natural environment, it was useful to have. But take a person with one-in-a-million skin and bone structure, add professional makeup and retouching, and you're no longer looking at beauty in its natural form. You've got pharmaceutical-grade beauty, ~ Ted Chiang

In a natural environment, nature controls the breeding cycles. In the man-made environment, abnormal environmental conditions control the unnatural breeding cycles. ~ Steven Magee

We are going to learn how to relate to the Earth and our own natural environment here by looking seriously at space colony ecologies. ~ Rusty Schweickart

The healing of our relationship with place begins with the preservation of the natural environment. We cannot go to the wild for renewal if no wilderness is left. ~ Starhawk

When on the set of a film, you have to play natural for entire scenes in a very unnatural environment. You have to express emotions and interact with other actors and also use your voice. ~ Helena Christensen

The jarring change going from an urban environment to an extremely remote natural environment is extremely inspiring. It's constantly stimulating, it's like a slap in the face. ~ Carter Burwell

The modern human has taken a pristine natural environment and has obliterated it with pollution, technology and overpopulation. ~ Steven Magee

I'm very obsessed with the energy of New York and the idea of the way people behave in the city versus the way they behave in a natural environment. ~ Marco Brambilla

To care for the natural world is the most effective insurance policy we can have ~ Phil Harding

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 thing we often forget to talk about, or perhaps we take for granted, is our country's dazzling beauty. Our natural environment is so much a part of Australia's art, writing, music and culture, both indigenous and non indigenous. ~ Quentin Bryce

The built environment is shaped not only by private sector development pratices, but also by the honored and fascinating field of planning. Planners in towns, counties, regional and state government, consulting firms and in economic development agencies translate ideas about human settlements into concrete designs. They can be generalists or specialize in transportation, urban centers, rural land use, economic development and more. At its best, the planning profession aims to mediate tensions between people, social groups, and the natural environment by creating an orderly process for determining common values, shared priorities and elegant principles for transcending conflicts. Therefore planners may find themselves caught in some of the most challenging political crossfire to be found. But they also have the opportunity to educate many sectors and communities. ~ Melissa Everett

Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path - the landscape, the natural environment, history and tradition, the amenities and civilities, the privacy and spaciousness of life, much beauty, and the fragile, slow-growing social structures that bind us together. ~ Charles A. Reich

Her whole conception of our interconnected natural environment gave her clarity to see that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere--and to reach out to others is very much in one's own self-interest. The transformation that occurs isn't limited to the person who is "helped." Instead, all involved are helped. All are transformed. ~ Cory Booker

The heart of our relationship, this natural environment that has blessed us really all along the west coast of North America, on both sides of the border we've realized that this incredible natural wealth comes with a price. ~ Dan Miller

I feel that we should not only maintain gentle, peaceful relations with our fellow human beings bur also that is very important to extend the same kind of attitude toward the natural environment. ~ Dalai Lama

Things perfected by nature are better than those finished by art. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

In the absence of any written analogue to speech, the sensible, natural environment remains the primary visual counterpart of spoken utterance, the palpable site, or matrix wherein meaning occurs and proliferates. In the absence of writing, we find ourselves situated in the field of discourse as we are embedded in the natural landscape; indeed, the two matrices are not separable. We can no more stabilize the language and render its meanings determinate than we can freeze all motion and metamorphosis within the land. ~ David Abram

...To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity, "labor power" cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity of "man" attached to the tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rovers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed... ~ Karl Polanyi

Sooner or later,
wittingly or unwittingly,
we must pay
for every intrusion
on the natural environment. ~ Barry Commoner

Limitation of scope, however, could represent a profound advantage from an ecological point of view. The sun, the wind and the earth are experiential realities to which men have responded sensuously and reverently from time immemorial. Out of these primal elements man developed his sense of dependence on - and respect for - the natural environment, a dependence that kept his destructive activities in check. The Industrial Revolution and the urbanized world that followed obscured nature's role in human experience - hiding the sun with a pall of smoke, blocking the winds with massive buildings, desecrating the earth with sprawling cities. Man's dependence on the natural world became invisible; it became theoretical and intellectual in character, the subject matter of textbooks, monographs and lectures. True, this theoretical dependence supplied us with insights (partial ones at best) into the natural world, but its onesidedness robbed us of all sensuous dependence on and all visible contact and unity with nature. In losing these, we lost a part of ourselves as feeling beings. We became alienated from nature. Our technology and environment became totally inanimate, totally synthetic - a purely inorganic physical milieu that promoted the deanimization of man and his thought. ~ Murray Bookchin

Water - the ocean - is our most natural environment.
We are born naked from the miniature ocean of the mother's womb. ~ Jacques Mayol

I thrive on production. It feels very much like a natural environment for me. ~ Kathryn Bigelow

Rather than think about fields producing food, and the rest of the land producing everything else, we need to think about managing integrated, multifunctional, landscapes ~ Tim Benton

For several months they'd been drifting toward political involvement, but the picture was hazy and one of the most confusing elements was their geographical proximity to Berkeley, the citadel of West Coast radicalism. Berkeley is right next door to Oakland, with nothing between them but a line on the map and a few street signs, but in many ways they are as different as Manhattan and the Bronx. Berkeley is a college town and, like Manhattan, a magnet for intellectual transients. Oakland is a magnet for people who want hour-wage jobs and cheap housing, who can't afford to live in Berkeley, San Francisco or any of the middle-class Bay Area suburbs. [10] It is a noisy, ugly, mean-spirited place, with the sort of charm that Chicago had for Sandburg. It is also a natural environment for hoodlums, brawlers, teenage gangs and racial tensions.

The Hell's Angels' massive publicity -- coming hard on the heels of the widely publicized student rebellion in Berkeley -- was interpreted in liberal-radical-intellectual circles as the signal for a natural alliance. Beyond that, the Angels' aggressive, antisocial stance -- their alienation, as it were -- had a tremendous appeal for the more aesthetic Berkeley temperament. Students who could barely get up the nerve to sign a petition or to shoplift a candy bar were fascinated by tales of the Hell's Angels ripping up towns and taking whatever they wanted. Most important, the Angels had a reputation for defying police, for successfully ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Bankers cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, the urban environment, on human culture. ~ Arthur Erickson

Minor segments of earlier history may have been rescued or 'retrieved' -- e.g. Greek 'democracy,' Aristotle, the Magna Carta, etc. -- but these remain subservient, if not instrumental, to the imperatives of the modern historical narrative and to the progress of 'Western civilization.' African and Asia, in most cases, continue to struggle in order to catch up, in the process not only forgoeing the privilege of drawing on their own traditions and historical experiences that shaped who they were and, partly, who they have become but also letting themselves be drawn into devastating wars, poverty, disease and the destruction of their natural environment. Modernity, whose hegemonic discourse is determined by the institutions and intellectuals of the powerful modern West, has not offered a fair shake to two-thirds of the world's population, who have lost their history and, with it, their organic ways of existence. ~ Wael B. Hallaq

We all, parents, educators, community leaders, and every ... citizen, need to come together to find new ways to engage children with the natural environment. ~ Laura Bush

Our global forests are the lungs of the world, and protecting them is fundamental for our survival. When we hand these forests over to future generations, we must be able to say we exercised our stewardship wisely and responsibly ~ Edward Davey

I therefore suggested that WWF should invite leaders from the major religions to meet together to discuss what - if any - responsibility they felt they had for the natural environment as a "sacred" entity. ~ Prince Philip

The space-dwelling nations of Shis'urna divided the universe into three parts. In the middle lay the natural environment of humans - space stations, ships, constructed habitats. Outside those was the Black - heaven, the home of God and everything holy. And within the gravity well of the planet Shis'urna itself - or for that matter any planet - lay the Underworld, the land of the dead from which humanity had had to escape in order to become fully free of its demonic influence. ~ Ann Leckie

The most dangerous of devotions, in my opinion, is the one endemic to Christianity: I was not born to be of this world. With a second life waiting, suffering can be endured
especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of the faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised. ~ E. O. Wilson

The ecologist has a much more comprehensive and holistic view of the world. We're looking at the natural environment as well as the human built environment and the connectivity between the two - how do the natural environment and the human-built environment interact and interface with each other. ~ Ken Yeang

Civilization ... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere. ~ Richard Bach

I recognize the need for technology that enriches life while preserving our natural environment. My goal is to stimulate productivity, but use technology to redeem, not to destroy our environment. ~ Gerald R. Ford

We are living as if we had three planets' worth of resources to live with rather than just one. We need to cut by about two-thirds our ecological footprint. For that we need one planet farming as well as one planet living - one planet farming which minimises the impact on the environment of food production and consumption, and which maximises its contribution to renewal of the natural environment ~ David Miliband

A pleasant natural environment is a good - a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

the great majority of people worldwide remain in the thrall of tribal organized religions, led by men who claim supernatural power in order to compete for the obedience and resources of the faithful. We are addicted to tribal conflict, which is harmless and entertaining if sublimated into team sports, but deadly when expressed as real-world ethnic, religious, and ideological struggles. There are other hereditary biases. Too paralyzed with self-absorption to protect the rest of life, we continue to tear down the natural environment, our species' irreplaceable and most precious heritage. And it is still taboo to bring up population policies aiming for an optimum people density, geographic distribution, and age distribution. ~ Edward O. Wilson

To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment ... would result in the demolition of society. ~ Karl Polanyi

From Indian vultures to Chinese bees, Nature provides the 'natural services' that keep the economy going ~ Tony Juniper

The natural environment sustains the life of all beings universally. ~ Dalai Lama

Silence must be comprehended as not solely the absence of sound. It is the natural environment for serenity and contemplation. Life without silence is life without privacy. The difference between sanity and madness is the quality of our thoughts. Silence is on the side of sanity. ~ Norman Cousins

If our economies are to flourish, if global poverty is to be banished, and if the wellbeing of the world's people enhanced - not just in this generation but in succeeding generations - we must make sure we take care of the natural environment and resources on which our economic activity depends. ~ Gordon Brown

A light wind swept over the corn, and all nature laughed in the sunshine. ~ Anne Bronte

It's common knowledge that in the entertainment industry there's a lot of craziness that goes down, and it's really hard for anyone to stay sane. It's not a very natural environment to be in for too long. It's not very healthy. ~ Natasha Bedingfield

We Floridians have always assumed an arrogant mastery over our natural environment. And we have always presumed ourselves capable of obliging the water that is all around us to behave itself. ~ Ronald Cunningham

There was just something so damn male about a man doing something with his hands. Something mechanical. Something sweaty. And dirty. Watching Coop in his natural environment was seriously turning her on. ~ Amy Andrews

This book explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo - our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East - in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction. ~ Alan W. Watts

And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. ~ Alan Watts

Under weak government, in a wide, thinly populated country, in the struggle against the raw natural environment and with the freeplay of economic forces, unified social groups become the transmitters of culture. ~ Johan Huizinga

Everything we think about regarding sustainability - from energy to agriculture to manufacturing to population - has a water footprint. Almost all of the water on Earth is salt water, and the remaining freshwater supplies are split between agricultural use and human use - as well as maintaining the existing natural environment. ~ Jamais Cascio

How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours? ~ Sheldon Vanauken

Not through the dogmas of archaic doctrines will you gain your greatest understandings, but, rather, through the continued evolution of science, and through your keen observations of the natural environment beyond your windows. To comprehend yourself truly, which is also to comprehend the world truly, you needn't look any farther than at what abounds with life around you - the blossoming meadow, the untrodden woodlands. Without this as mankind's overriding objective, I don't foresee an age of actual enlightenment ever arriving. ~ Mitch Cullin

Reverence for the natural environment, and experiencing the interconnectedness between all things has long guided me to create watercolor paintings of beauty and spirit. Life's continuing adventure has led me into an exciting exploration into the wisdom and symbolic imagery of Sacred Geometry. These paintings act as a bridge between this reality and a metaphorical world of healing, continuity, and transformation. I use multiple transparent watercolor glazes coupled with image overlapping techniques, and sacred geometry to produce visions of a multi-dimensional reality. It is my intention to create art that embodies the vibration of Universal Love and expresses the joy and gratitude I feel for the honor of being part of this earthwalk."
~Blessings, Francene~ ~ Francene Hart

Nature is not a drag on growth. Its protection is an unavoidable prerequisite for sustaining economic development ~ Tony Juniper

In its broadest ecological context, economic development is the development of more intensive ways of exploiting the natural environment. ~ Richard G. Wilkinson

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you. ~ Diane Setterfield

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. ~ Paul R. Ehrlich

If we and the rest of the back-boned animals were to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well. But if the invertebrates were to disappear, the world's ecosystems would collapse ~ David Attenborough

For Art may err, but Nature cannot miss. ~ John Dryden

Doing work which has to be done over and over again helps us recognize the natural cycles of growth and decay, of birth and death, and thus become aware of the dynamic order of the universe. "Ordinary" work, as the root meaning of the term indicates, is work that is in harmony with the order we perceive in the natural environment. ~ Fritjof Capra

These kinds of comments throughout early sessions establish the therapist as someone who knows about the past, is not afraid to talk about it, and understands how the current environment is filled with reminders of past traumatic events. ~ Joyanna L. Silberg

It occurred to me that a food drive would be a natural way to talk to kids about hunger, which so many of them simply aren't aware of. ~ K.A. Applegate

Verse is the natural speech of men, as singing is of birds'
The Week's Survey, 18 June 1904 ~ Edward Thomas

Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock. Out of this vast number, the whole of our understanding of human prehistory is based on the remains, often exceedingly fragmentary, of perhaps five thousand individuals. You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up, Ian Tattersall, the bearded and friendly curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, replied when I asked him the size of the total world archive of hominid and early human bones.
The shortage wouldn't be so bad if the bones were distributed evenly through time and space, but of course they are not. They appear randomly, often in the most tantalizing fashion. Homo erectus walked the Earth for well over a million years and inhabited territory from the Atlantic edge of Europe to the Pacific side of China, yet if you brought back to life every Homo erectus individual whose existence we can vouch for, they wouldn't fill a school bus. Homo habilis consists of even less: just two partial skeletons and a number of isolated limb bones. Something as short-lived as our own civilization would almost certainly not be known from the fossil record at all.
In Europe, Tattersall offers by way of illustration, you've got hominid skulls in Georgia dated to about 1.7 million years ago, but then you have a gap of almost a millio ~ Bill Bryson

I'm 100% natural. No silicon, no synthetic hormones or steroids, no artificial flavors, colors or preservatives. ~ Jayde Scott

I can't get over the exciting beauty of New York - the pencil buildings so high and far that the blueness of the sky floats about them; the feeling that one's taxis, and shopping, all go on in the deep canyon-beds of natural erosions rather than in the excrescences of human builders. ~ Freya Stark

Why would scientists dedicated to uncovering the truth about the natural world deliberately misrepresent the work of their own colleagues? Why would they spread accusations with no basis? Why would they refuse to correct their arguments once they had been shown to be incorrect? And why did the press continue to quote them, year after year, even as their claims were shown, one after another, to be false? ~ Naomi Oreskes

How may paintings have preserved the image of a divine beauty which in its natural manifestation has been rapidly overtaken by time or death. Thus, the work of the painter is nobler than that of nature, its mistress. ~ Leonardo Da Vinci

... humans are animals. It would not occur to an ethologist studying ants, lions, wolves or giraffes to argue that 'ultimately' it is the animal's need for food which determines the type of society in which it lives, or its need to reproduce, or its mechanisms of defence against predators, or whatever. On the contrary, he will see the society in question as the outcome of a compromise between a variety of fundamental needs and the environment in which it is set. Precisely the same is true of human societies. [...] all attempts to explain human history in terms of a single factor are misguided. ~ Patricia Crone

Flocks of magpies have descended on our yard. I cannot sleep for all their raucous behavior. Perched on weathered fences, their green-black tales, long as rulers, wave up and down, reprimanding me for all I have not done.

I have done nothing for weeks. I have no work. I don't want to see anyone much less talk. All I want to do is sleep.

Monday, I hit rock-bottom, different from bedrock, which is solid, expansive, full of light and originality. Rock-bottom is the bottom of the rock, the underbelly that rarely gets turned over; but when it does, I am the spider that scurries from daylight to find another place to hide.

Today I feel stronger, learning to live with the natural cycles of a day and to not expect so much from myself. As women, we hold the moon in our bellies. It is too much to ask to operate on full-moon energy three hundred and sixty-five days a year. I am in a crescent phase. And the energy we expend emotionally belongs to the hidden side of the moon.... ~ Terry Tempest Williams