Alice Walker Quotes

I don't need to make money destroying my environment. Why don't I just love it and figure out a way to be more sustainable?

People could see by your actions on the park that you cared about it. If we got beat, I'd fling the Sunday papers in the bin and wouldn't read them.

It is a wonderful honor to receive the Audubon Medal from the National Audubon Society, which for more than a century has fought tirelessly to protect and preserve our natural resources and environment for future generations.

I worry that more and more kids my age are growing up without experiencing the outdoors, which means that fewer will care about the natural world.

It is impossible to teach people to conserve nature if they don't learn to love nature.

We have to start listening to nature now.

I had so much fun touring the Grand Canyon area with the Sierra Club. I love to get outdoors and enjoy nature. We went kayaking, mountain biking, hiking, and even rode mules. To do all these things in one of the most stunning natural areas in the world just made it more amazing. I don't believe that anyone can see the Grand Canyon area for themselves and not know that we have to do everything we can to protect it for future generations.

Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment, people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past ... [A] new ecological awareness is beginning to emerge which rather than being downplayed, ought to be encouraged to develop into concrete programs and initiatives.

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.

I realize the answer is not to create wilderness and walk away.

There's been progress toward seeing that nature and culture are not opposing terms, and that wilderness is not the only kind of landscape for environmentalists to concern themselves with.

Children are still in love with the wonders of nature, and I am, too. So I write them stories in hopes that they will want to protect all the beautiful creatures and places.

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

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.

I have no problem with the adventure travel movement. It makes better, more sensitive people. If you get people diving on a coral reef, they're going to become more respectful of the outdoors and more concerned with the threats that places like that face and they're going to care more about protecting them than they would have before.

If children have an interest in nature, they will understand. I want them to become people who appreciate the consequences the next generation will suffer if we destroy our natural surroundings. So without a doubt, they need to learn that nature is vital to us by experiencing it. I want them to like nature and to climb mountains and so on.

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.

The recent upsurge of public concern over environmental questions reflects a belated recognition that man has been too cavalier in his relations with nature. Unless we arrest the depredations that have been inflicted so carelessly on our natural systems-which exist in an intricate set of balances-we face the prospect of ecological disaster.

There is much the government can do and should do to improve the environment. But even more important is the individual who plants a tree or cleans a corner of neglect. For it is the individual who himself benefits, and also protects a heritage of beauty for his children and future generations.

We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.

Tell the Earth how much you care, how beautiful she is, and how much you love her. Ask for her forgiveness for having been so careless.

Think globally, act locally": "Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.

We need to be rid of the insane policy of environmentalism. No more 'green', anti-growth, anti-science environmental policy.

We have come tardily to the tremendous task of cleaning up our environment. We should have moved with similar zeal at least a decade ago. But no purpose is served by post-mortems. With visionary zeal but the greatest realism, we must now address ourselves to the vast problems that confront us.

Right now, our mother -- our mother -- all of our mothers, Mother Earth is hurting. And she needs a generation of thoughtful, caring and active kids like all of you to protect her for the future. You can help us win the battle to clean up our air, our water, our land, to protect our forests, our oceans and our wildlife.