Alex Steffen Quotes

When I was 7 years old, I announced that I was going to write a book about pollution. I didn't get around to it until I was 29, but I always recognized that pollution was a theft. That it was a way of stealing something from the public - the common earth.

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

I think the greatest challenge in environmentalism and the most rewarding challenge is trying to figure out how humans can meet their needs while protecting the environment.

Further devastation of the air, land and sea is obviously a very real possibility, unless the attitudes of politicians and all who irresponsibly exploit our natural resources change significantly in the very near future and all collaborate and sacrifice for the good of the planet.

If, in our haste to 'progress,' the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America. We cannot afford an America where expedience tramples upon esthetics and development decisions are made with an eye only on the present.

I'm a radical environmentalist; I think the sooner we asphyxiate in our own filth, the better. The world will do better without us. Maybe some fuzzy animals will go with us, but there'll be plenty of other animals, and they'll be back.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

Environmental activism against the resource industry is widespread all over the world, but at the same time we have to realise that these are basic materials on which civilisation depends. We need to tap natural resources in a sustainable manner.

The destruction of our environment and resources cannot be stemmed unless the growth of the world's population is stemmed and ultimately reduced.

Climate change is destroying our path to sustainability. Ours is a world of looming challenges and increasingly limited resources. Sustainable development offers the best chance to adjust our course.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

The truth is, natural organisms have managed to do everything we want to do without guzzling fossil fuels, polluting the planet or mortgaging the future.

How we treat the earth basically effects our social welfare and our national security.

Keep talking about moving toxic wastes, but never let it cross your mind to quit producing them. Keep Judging yourselves in Manson. Don't look in the mirror. You will serve the Earth as much as she serves you or you will commit suicide.

For him nature is basically a golf course or a ranch--or a national park turned into a country club where folks can burn off stress by speeding over the snow while polluting the air of Yellowstone with gas-guzzling skidoos.

Every time there is an economic intensification, there is an ecological impact.

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

There's so much out in the world that is not good for the environment.

Even the wealth of the U.S. cannot protect against the levels of environmental destruction that we are unleashing.

We happen to believe that emissions going into the atmosphere are not good for us as humans or Mother Earth.