Mark Shand Quotes

Somali is turning into a desert. Rwanda, you can hardly find a place to plant a potato, it's so crowded.

In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.

I believe our biggest issue is the same biggest issue that the whole world is facing, and that's habitat destruction.

We have become frighteningly effective at altering nature.

In many places where coffee is grown, deforestation is a major issue.

Loss of soil productivity, which is causing extensive land abandonment, is a widespread by-product of current practices in agriculture and animal husbandry. Since 1945, 11 percent of the earth's vegetated surface has been degraded—an area larger than India and China combined—and per capita food production in many parts of the world is decreasing.

Pollution is a serious one. Water pollution, air pollution, and then solid hazardous waste pollution. And then beyond that, we also have the resources issue. Not just water resources but other natural resources, the mining resources being consumed, and the destruction of our ecosystem.

If you look at it ecologically, deforestation is high on the list of things which bring devastation. You cut down trees to build homes, for fuel, and you end up with no trees left, and you have to move on. If you take the earth as a whole, eventually there's nowhere to move on to.

Even as global warming increases the frequency of El Nino and the Atlantic event, their effects are being amplified by the annual loss of an area of rain forest the size of New Jersey. Less rain falls, and the water runs into the rivers instead of being sucked up by the fungus filaments and tree roots.

The tropical rain forests are a telling example. Once cut down, they rarely recover. Rainfall drops, deserts spread, the climate warms.

Human civilization has been changing the Earth's environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.

Food production has affected the environment more than any other activity humans have engaged in. Humanity devotes more land to food production than anything else - roughly a third of the surface area of the earth, much of which was once forest but has been converted by humans into farms or grazing lands.

Nature stopped being natural decades ago.

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.

Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system.

If you have forest, if you have green forest, the water table goes up. What happens with deforestation is the water level goes down and we all know how much importance drinking water has.

Many of the wars this century were about oil, but those of the next century will be over water

Formerly, Ireland was a vast forest…. It is now almost destitute of trees.

Our planetary system is affected by a magnitude of force as powerful as any naturally occurring global catastrophe, but one caused solely by a single species: us.

Producing food to eat is the single most destructive environmental activity humans engage in.

It's the poorer people in tropical zones who will get really hit by climate change - as well as some ecosystems, which nobody wants to see disappear.

If you're trashing your own country, ruining the soils, contaminating the waters and the air, cutting down trees, overfishing the lakes, rivers and oceans, you're not much of a patriot.

We're not just polluting a river and killing a couple of top predator animals; we're eradicating the krill, the necessary algae. We're dismantling the insect and amphibian worlds. We're going for the building blocks.

The Amazon is still burning; we just don't hear the smoke detectors anymore.