Orson Scott Card Quotes

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century

Information from destructive activities going back a hundred years right up until today is being incorporated into the system. And as that happens the underlying framework of industrialism is collapsing and causing disintegration.

Everybody knows that the industrialized nations are the worst offenders.

Natural disasters in Bolivia have been getting worse with the passage of time. It's brought about by a system: the capitalist system, the unbridled industrialization of the resources of the Planet Earth.

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.

I think we can work through a lot of political and international problems, but what really frightens me is what's happening environmentally.

My generation has left the globe in a mess.

China is bearing the environmental cost for much of the world because China is the factory of the world.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window.

It's very important that people realize: the air is being taken away, the oceans are being taken away, the room is being taken away, but we're so worried about gas prices that we don't even see this stuff.

Runaway technology, whose only law is profit, has for years poisoned our air, ravaged our soil, stripped our forests bare, and corrupted our water resources

The causal chain of the deterioration (of the environment) is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide---all can be traced easily to too many people.

We feel that the road to technology.... has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth

China is the world’s second largest economy, but the enormous costs of its growth are becoming apparent. Residents of its boom cities and a growing number of rural regions question the safety of the air they breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat. It is as if they were living in the Chinese equivalent of the Chernobyl or Fukushima nuclear disaster areas. The environmental hazards here are legion, and the consequences might not manifest themselves for years or even decades.

In a broader sense, the irony in all of this is the single most necessary element for life to exist, in fact, is killing everything, from our ecosystems to potentially our food supply if we're poisoning fish and the foods that we eat. That is the broader sense.

In the 1950s and '60s, America's natural resources were in bad shape. Communities were so polluted that clouds of smog lingered over cities like Los Angeles. Rivers and lakes were filled with chemicals. In my hometown of Boston, the harbor was among the nation's most polluted waterways.

There's so much burying of heads in sand going on in the U.S., people are finally beginning to recognize that the environment is dying, but it's far too late, and I am conflicted.

Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It’s global warming. It’s ruining our country. It’s ruining our world.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

Business is destroying the world, with flair, expertise, and panache.