Environmental Quotes

This is absolutely bizarre that we continue to subsidize highways beyond the gasoline tax, airlines, and we don't subsidize, we don't want to subsidize a national rail system that has environmental impact.
– Joe Biden
We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice. We have fought for criminal justice. Now we must add a new fight - the fight for electoral justice.
– Barbara Boxer
Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved.
– Bill Bradley
You will die but the carbon will not; its career does not end with you. It will return to the soil, and there a plant may take it up again in time, sending it once more on a cycle of plant and animal life.
– Jacob Bronowski
If you violate Nature's laws you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.
– Luther Burbank
People blame their environment. There is only one person to blame - and only one - themselves.
– Robert Collier
Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
– William J. Durant
The environment is everything that isn't me.
– Albert Einstein
I've always been a strong supporter of environmental protection and initiatives in that area. But I'm willing to set priorities. If we have to make reductions in one place, we'll have to-in order to increase another place, I'm willing to do that.
– Judd Gregg
I align myself with almost all researchers in assuming that anything we do is a composite of whatever genetic limitations were given to us by our parents and whatever kinds of environmental opportunities are available.
– Howard Gardner
No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.
– Garrett Hardin
Much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science.
– James Inhofe
Since the day he came into office, President Bush has worked to gut more than 34 years of hard work by weakening many of our Nation's standing environmental laws, some of which were signed into law by his father.
– James Jeffords
When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man we call him a vandal. When he destroys one of the works of god we call him a sportsman.
– Joseph Wood Krutch
Ethanol is a premier, high performance fuel. It has tremendous environmental benefits and is a key component to energy independence for our country.
– Richard Lugar
Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.
– Marshall McLuhan
Pushing production out of America to nations without our environmental standards increases global environmental risks.
– Frank H. Murkowski
Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we'll soon be in trouble.
– Roger Tory Peterson
I consider myself to have been the bridge between the shotgun and the binoculars in bird watching. Before I came along, the primary way to observe birds was to shoot them and stuff them.
– Roger Tory Peterson
Not all is doom and gloom. We are beginning to understand the natural world and are gaining a reverence for life - all life.
– Roger Tory Peterson
Architects in the past have tended to concentrate their attention on the building as a static object. I believe dynamics are more important: the dynamics of people, their interaction with spaces and environmental condition.
– John Portman
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
A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
– Edward O. Wilson
When we realize we can make a buck cleaning up the environment, it will be done!
– Dennis Weaver
You may be able to fool the voters, but not the atmosphere.
– Donella Meadows
You cannot achieve environmental security and human development without addressing the basic issues of health and nutrition.
– Gro Harlem Brundtland
Without international participation, jobs and emissions will simply shift overseas to countries that require few, if any, environmental protections, harming the global environment as well as the U.S. economy.
– Fred Upton
Within 10 years it will be impossible to travel to the North Pole by dog team. There will be too much open water.
– Will Steger
Why should we not expect self-designated environmental leaders to practice what they preach?
– David Frum
Why has it seemed that the only way to protect the environment is with heavy-handed government regulation?
– Gale Norton
Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.
– Garrett Hardin
While the Environmental Genome Project does not seek to assign allele frequencies, we are aware of the importance of accurate allele frequency estimates for future epidemiologic studies and the large sample sizes such estimates will require.
– Samuel Wilson
What I have experienced over time is that environmental problems are easier to deal with in ways that don't go into their interconnections to the rest of what we are.
– Barry Commoner
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
We're not trying to reinvent the wheel for any environmental organization to claim sole responsibility for any kind of victory is insane, because everybody attacks these problems as a group.
– Ted Danson
We should restore a proper balance in environmental regulation and energy production that is based on common sense, not political agendas.
– Mac Thornberry
We now see numerous examples of brands working together to address issues such as environmental degradations, climate control, pollution, poverty and disease.
– Simon Mainwaring
We need to accept the seemingly obvious fact that a toxic environment can make people sick and that no amount of medical intervention can protect us. The health care community must become a powerful political lobby for environmental policy and legislation.
– Andrew Weil
We must return to nature and nature's god.
– Luther Burbank
We learned that economic growth and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand.
– Christopher Dodd
We have a project with Unocal here in Los Angeles, where we as an environmental organization, the oil company, and the state all get together to promote the recycling of used motor oil.
– Ted Danson
We had some major successes and we did so because the country embraced the spirit of Earth Day and embraced this concept that we have to have forward-looking, visionary environmental policy and energy policy in this country.
– Jay Inslee
We don't have to sacrifice a strong economy for a healthy environment.
– Dennis Weaver
We created the Cabinet Committee on the Environment to review the environmental implications of all government initiatives. I think what made us successful was the fact that it was a sustained approach. We did something new every year.
– Brian Mulroney
We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.
– Paul Hawken
We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.
– Paul Hawken
We all recognize that in recent decades, many important achievements have helped create a cleaner, healthier environment, yet our national needs in environmental health are not being fully met.
– Samuel Wilson
Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.
– Victoria Principal
Under the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star Program, homes are independently verified to be measurably more energy efficient than average houses.
– Melissa Bean
Toxins love to get you while you're young. Lead, mercury, secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature, vulnerable and growing than when it's mature and comparatively fixed.
– Jeffrey Kluger
Time after time we're told corporations should have freedom from pesky job safety regulations, environmental protections and labor standards - giving working people the freedom to be crushed in collapsing mines, choke on filthy air and get paid too little to live on.
– Richard Trumka
This Nation has realized significant environmental improvements over the last three decades.
– Jerry Costello
They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.
– Sitting Bull
These days, most nature photographers are deeply committed to the environmental message.
– Galen Rowell
There's so many issues tied to the meat industry. I mean, social, environmental, humanitarian - all of them. I know that when I'm eating that I'm not hurting the planet, I'm not hurting other people on this planet, I'm not hurting animals... and I'm not hurting nature.
– Maggie Q
There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.
– James Fallows
There should be more attention paid to scientific research in the ecology area, and I think that such attention to proper environmental concerns would make the public feel much better about it.
– Thomas R. Cech
There is no question that photography has played a major role in the environmental movement.
– Galen Rowell
There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place!
– David R. Brower
There is no 'need' for us to eat meat, dairy or eggs. Indeed, these foods are increasingly linked to various human diseases and animal agriculture is an environmental disaster for the planet.
– Gary L. Francione
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
There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.
– Noam Chomsky
There are nuclear weapons in China, Iran, Korea and Pakistan. It wouldn't take much to send a couple of warheads off on this planet somewhere that would cause a lot of environmental damage, then if you have got someone who wants to retaliate you have real problems.
– Edward James Olmos
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
There are a tremendous amount of environmental issues that are on the table.
– Ed Rendell
The wave of new productive enterprises would provide opportunities to remedy the unjust distribution of environmental hazards among economic classes and racial and ethnic communities.
– Barry Commoner
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
The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.
– Jeremy Rifkin
The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.
– Richard Rogers
The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.
– Barry Commoner
The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture.
– Gaylord Nelson
The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
– Barry Commoner
The main environmental challenge of the 21st century is poverty. When you don't know where your next meal is coming from, it's hard to consider the environment 100 years down the line.
– Bjorn Lomborg
The infrastructure for linking environmental health and public health is not working as well as it should.
– Samuel Wilson
The industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company's bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy.
– Daniel Goleman
The government should set a goal for a clean environment but not mandate how that goal should be implemented.
– Dixy Lee Ray
The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
– Barry Commoner
The environmental movement, like all political processes, reacts best to disasters. But these are very slow, very gradual disasters in the making.
– Ted Danson
The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.
– Barry Commoner
The Endangered Species Act is the strongest and most effective tool we have to repair the environmental harm that is causing a species to decline.
– Norm Dicks
The Body Shop Foundation is run by our staff and supports social activism and environmental activism. We don't tend to support big agencies.
– Anita Roddick
Ted Turner is still a leader. And he sets a great example. His ability financially has been reduced, but his influence and his example still is an important asset to the whole environmental movement.
– Maurice Strong
Some types of environmental restoration projects are well-known restored wetlands, for instance, or coal mine reclamation projects. Recently though, larger dam removal projects have started, a number of them in Washington state.
– Matt Gonzalez
So to hope to be able to have peace, to be able to have justice and environmental balance, are consequences of our behavior, not just our intentions.
– Godfrey Reggio
Raising awareness on the most pressing environmental issues of our time is more important than ever.
– Leonardo DiCaprio
Public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation - not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats. The implications for the planet are grim.
– Michael E. Mann
Practically every environmental problem we have can be traced to our addiction to fossil fuels, primarily oil.
– Dennis Weaver
Population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every 25 years or increases in a geometrical ratio.
– Thomas Malthus
People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.
– Michael Pollan
Over and over, we hear politicians say they can't spend our tax dollars on environmental protection when the economy is so fragile.
– David Suzuki
Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination.
– Al Gore
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
One of the things that I've always thought I would like to do is to develop an environmental index. Then people can measure their own environmental performance on an index as they do in other ways.
– Maurice Strong
One of the responsibilities faced by the Environmental Genome Project is to provide the science base upon which society can make better informed risk management decisions.
– Samuel Wilson
On the environmental front there's concern about global warming and high levels of carbon dioxide, and trees take in CO2 and store carbon.
– Clive Anderson
Of the 55 refineries closed in America in the last 10 years, they were all closed for economic reasons, mostly oil company mergers. Not a single one was closed for environmental purposes or objections.
– Peter DeFazio
Nuclear power will help provide the electricity that our growing economy needs without increasing emissions. This is truly an environmentally responsible source of energy.
– Michael Burgess
No one does a better, cleaner, or environmental friendlier, than the United States, when it comes to drilling for oil, gas, coal, oil refineries and fish friendly hydroelectric.
– David Pratt
New Zealand needs to balance its environmental responsibilities with its economic opportunities, because the risk is that if you don't do that - and you want to lead the world - then you might end up getting unintended consequences.
– John Key
Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.
– James Buchan