Jim Fowler Quotes

I don't want to save a creek for the creek's sake, but what's in it for human beings.

Conservation of land and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand

True conservation means protecting the entire habitat.

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

Raising awareness on the most pressing environmental issues of our time is more important than ever.

I'm very concerned for the future of the earth and its amazing creatures. We've got to be careful and make sure we don't foul our own nest.

Genetic design is something we can use to fight the lack of sustainability we humans are forcing on the earth's environment.

This Earth is our only home. Together, we must protect and cherish it.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

The future will either be green or not at all.

The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture.

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

For conservation to be successful it is necessary to take into consideration that it is a characteristic of man that he can only be relied upon to do anything consistently which is in his own interest. He may have occasional fits of conscience and moral rectitude but otherwise his actions are governed by self-interest. It follows then that whatever the moral reasons for conservation it will only be achieved by the inducement of profit or pleasure.

Conservation has been in eclipse in this country ever since Theodore Roosevelt’s day. It had barely gotten off the ground when Uncle Joe Cannon, the Speaker of the House in those days, issued his ultimatum: “Not 1 cent for scenery.” Well, today we are repealing Cannon’s law. We are declaring a new doctrine of conservation.

Ecological policy rejects exploitative forms of economy and the unscrupulous plundering of natural resources and raw materials, as well as the destructive interventions into nature's ability to renew itself. We believe that the exploitation of nature as well as human beings must be stopped if we are to master this acute threat to life on earth.

To protect the natural environment is to protect the possibilities for youth.

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

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

In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

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.

Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.

The reason that I keep writing is that all my most powerful messages about the fates of wild places that I care about need to have words as well as images.

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

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