Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

It’s only the urban middle class who is interested in the preservation of the countryside because they don’t have to live in it.

There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. When the whole of the world is reduced to nothing but human product, we will have lost the map that can show us how we got here, and can offer our spirits an answer when we ask why. Surely we are capable of declaring sacred some quarters that we dare not enter or possess.

Ecology is a dirty seven-letter word to many people. They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. "Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!"

Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Nature, too, shall live its own life. We must beware not to disrupt it with the color of our houses and interior fittings. yet we should not attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together into a higher unity.

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

No one should be able to enter a wilderness by mechanical means.

Fundamentally, if you look at where the environmental issues are coming from, it's all because of humans and our impact on the environment, so while it's true that one individual is not going to sufficiently fix the environment, it is a necessary thing.

I am an environmentalist, but I'm not a wacko environmentalist. I believe that mankind and nature can live side-by-side for the mutual benefit of both.

All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder - and ultimately impossible to solve - with ever more people.

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.

The great task for environmental historians is to record and analyze the effects of man's recently achieved control over the natural world. What is needed is a longer-term global, comparative, historical perspective that treats the environment as a meaningful variable.

Man's war against nature is a war against himself.

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

No-one wants polluted air, water or land, denuded forests or extinct animal species. But the error most people make is to trust the legislature to prevent these tragedies. What they don’t realize is how big a role the legislature has played historically in causing environmental destruction.

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.”

Wildlife film-makers I know tell me that the effort to portray what looks like an untouched ecosystem becomes harder every year. They have to choose their camera angles ever more carefully to exclude the evidence of destruction, travel further to find the Edens they depict.

The most profound and serious indication of the moral implications underlying the ecological problem is the lack of respect for life evident in many of the patterns of environmental pollution.

I will be very sad when global warming and toxins kill off all the toads and frogs and salamanders. Here's hoping we, as humans, figure out a way to be less stupid.

We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.

Nature is actually resilient, if we take care to just stop actively destroying it.

To be modern is to destroy nature.