Anonymous Quotes

Land is not something you inherit from your parents. It is something you borrow from your children.

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.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

I do believe very strongly that all of us and all of the other things in the context of our planet with Mother Nature, all of these things absolutely have a profound effect.

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?

The United States has consumed in the last 50 years more natural resources than the rest of the entire human race for all of history.

We all live downstream

Try to leave the Earth a better place than when you arrived.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.

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.

The Anthropocentic Age - the first age in which humankind is the dominant species on the planet - cuts both ways: it is up to us to destroy or save the planet. We certainly have the ability.

If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.

Environmental policy must strike a balance between the earth's best interests and our citizen's pressing needs.

The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.

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.

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

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

As a nation we have not yet come to have a proper respect for the forest and to regard it as an indispensable part of our resources—one which is easily destroyed but difficult to replace; one which confers great benefits while it endures, but whose disappearance is accompanied by a train of evil consequences not readily foreseen and positively irreparable.

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.