Edward Burtynsky Quotes

Our minds and memories are crowded with the common experience of nature.

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

I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.

If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.

Now that I'm older, I have a much better appreciation of nature, and I love being alone.

Every animal leaves traces of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.

A place is an area within an environment that has been altered in such a way to make the general environment more conspicuous.

It is one thing to hear about the forest and the river, but an entirely other experience to go there, to see the environment, and to appreciate the natural riches there first-hand.

I make photographs and still make photographs of the natural environment. It's a love because that was part of my life before I was involved in photography.

I know that the only reason American landscapes sometimes disappoint me is that, just a century before I was born, the great rivers and prairies and wild forests still existed. And they were sublime.

I grew up in a wood cabin on Puget Sound in Manchester, Wash. My family taught me to appreciate the arts and the outdoors, and I still yearn for the absolute silence I experienced there when I was young.

If you spend time alone in the wilderness, you get very attuned to living things.

I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.

As one who has often felt this need, and who has found refreshment in wild places, I attest to the recreational value of wilderness.

What I want to do with my filmmaking is help kids experience the truth and wisdom of nature no matter where they are, whether or not they have the opportunity to go to a national park.

I hope for the experience of people standing together, turning their backs to the city and facing this, and hearing the leaves rustle. Well, maybe it won't be as bucolic as at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but I know you will feel removed from the city.

We live in an epoch of denudation.

We were contented to let things remain as the great spirit made them. They were not, and would change the rivers and mountains if they did not suit them.

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

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

If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they're full of bicycle trails.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

Apart from the hostile influence of man, the organic and the inorganic world are ... bound together by such mutual relations and adaptations s secure, if not the absolute permanence and equilibrium of both ... at least a very slow and gradual succession of changes in those conditions. But man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.