Environment

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. – Henry David Thoreau

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago… had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands. – Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life, 1923

In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. – Paul Brooks, The Pursuit of Wilderness, 1971

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites. – William Ruckelshaus, Business Week, 18 June 1990

When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable to a fine of $50. When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded. – Pat Brown, quoted in David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising, 1985

I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend? – Robert Redford, Yosemite National Park dedication, 1985

We never know the worth of water till the well is dry. – Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. – Native American Proverb

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. – Marshall McLuhan, 1964

Newspapers: dead trees with information smeared on them. – Horizon, "Electronic Frontier"

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers. – James G. Watt, quoted in Newsweek, 8 March 1982

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun. – Ralph Nader, quoted in Linda Botts, ed., Loose Talk, 1980

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. – Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. – Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958

The packaging for a microwavable “microwave” dinner is programmed for a shelf life of maybe six months, a cook time of two minutes and a landfill dead-time of centuries. – David Wann, Buzzworm, November 1990

So bleak is the picture… that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century. – Philip Shabecoff, New York Times Magazine, 4 June 1978

Economic advance is not the same thing as human progress. – John Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain, 1957

The problem is no longer that with every pair of hands that comes into the world there comes a hungry stomach. Rather it is that, attached to those hands are sharp elbows. – Paul A. Samuelson, Newsweek, 12 June 1967