Catherine Oxenberg Quotes

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

The images of Earth's delicate biosphere, contrasting with the sterile moonscape where the astronauts left their footsteps, have become iconic for environmentalists: these may indeed be the Apollo programme's most enduring legacy.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

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

The planet does nothing but support us, and we are constantly committing crimes against nature.

We shouldn't be saying 'Save the planet'; we should be saying: 'Save viable conditions in which people can live.' That's what we're dealing with here.

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

It saddens me that in the 21st century, with all our knowledge and power, we are hearing more and more stories of possible extinctions due to people's choice. We are responsible for our choices and the only ones capable of changing our future.

Humans have occupied a position in nature that they should not. It is impossible for humans to conquer 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.

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

I don't flatter myself - I'm not a scientist, I'm not a conservation expert.

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

We have the world to live in on the condition that we will take good care of it. And to take good care of it, we have to know it. And to know it and to be willing to take care of it, we have to love it.

So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us. Because the planet doesn't need to be saved. It doesn't care if all the squirrels, elephants, and trees die and there's just a couple of amoebas floating around at the poles.

In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.

The latest revelation - from no Mount Sinai, Sermon on the Mount or Bo tree - is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what that creation once was.

If you sort of treat the environment in sort of this mechanical, industrial way that there's a disconnect between man and the environment, it's very easy to treat people that way.

It's not that hard to imagine the natural world recovering it's health in our absence: it's more difficult, and more necessary, to imagine it recovering its health in our presence.

I want to interpret the natural world and our links to it. It's driven by the belief of many world-class scientists that we're in the midst of an extinction crisis... This time it's us that's doing it.

Address these environmental issues and you will address every issue known to man. And we keep dabbling in things that aren't really that important in the long term.

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.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

A healthy environment is essential to a livable Oregon and a strong economy.

Over the long haul of life on this planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.