Michael Pollan Quotes

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

I sincerely believe that there's room for cutting down trees for forestry and grazing, so as we all get to eat. Everyone has to compromise.

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

Since the beginning of civilization humans have altered our environment and its biology to allow our civilization to thrive - from domesticating plants and animals to building shelter and tools from living organisms.

The thing that gave me the most pain in life, psychologically, and it gave me tremendous pain psychologically, is man's disrespect for nature.

Fortunately, nature is as generous with its problems as Nobel with his fortune. The more we know, the more aware we are of what we know not.

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

The latest revelation - from no Mount Sinai, Sermon on the Mount or Bo tree - is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what that creation once was.

You can say, like, planet Earth has an existing geology, and what we do as human beings and as architects is that we try to sort of alter and modify and expand the geology.

It's not that hard to imagine the natural world recovering it's health in our absence: it's more difficult, and more necessary, to imagine it recovering its health in our presence.

My niche will be to support the environment through the growth of organic agriculture.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.

The earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization.

I don't want to save a creek for the creek's sake, but what's in it for human beings.

The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

The English countryside, its growth and its destruction, is a genuine and tragic theme.

When I arrived on the planet, there were only two billion. Wildlife was more abundant, we were less so; now the situation is reversed.

Life is insanely robust, though we can make species go extinct, and this is the bad thing. So I always make the point that you can't say, 'Is it too late?' That is the terrible question, because either answer promotes inaction. If it's too late, you don't need to act; if it's not too late, you don't need to act.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

No species is more important than others.

Earth was not built to serve the needs of humans.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

Man is a complex animal; he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

It's nice to think about having everything natural and similar to pre-Columbian times.... In fact, man himself has long been part of that environment and there is no way to separate him from that environment.

Before we start criticizing capitalism, we ought to try it. We don't factor the value of nature and its services into the market equation. Every year we use roughly $33 trillion worth of nature's services throughout the world's civilizations, and we make little or no effort to pay any of that back. We just use it. Look at the service a bee provides us, for example. A bee doesn't charge hourly fees or anything else. But if we lose the bees, we're not going to eat. And the pollinators are disappearing.