Nathan Phillips Quotes

I think it's really important that we understand that we share this world and we're connected to it.

The environment is more than just nature. The environment is peoples needs.

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.

The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.

Not all is doom and gloom. We are beginning to understand the natural world and are gaining a reverence for life - all life.

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.

Unless we connect directly with the earth, we will not have the faintest clue why we should save it…. Only if we understand the beauty of nature will we love it, and only if we become alerted to learn about the planet's disease processes can we decide to live our lives with a proper sense of ecological responsibility.

In the final analysis we all inhabit the same planet, we all breath the same air, we all cherish our children’s future, and we are all mortal.

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

First and foremost we are Earthlings.

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.

I never lose an opportunity to speak about my obsession: humankind and the environment.

I am a conservationist. It is in my DNA.

Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

Fortunately, nature is as generous with its problems as Nobel with his fortune. The more we know, the more aware we are of what we know not.

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

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 time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.

I think the greatest challenge in environmentalism and the most rewarding challenge is trying to figure out how humans can meet their needs while protecting the environment.

Your connections with other people are important, our connection to the earth.

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.

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.

One who neglects or disregards the existence of earth, air, fire, water and vegetation disregards his own existence which is entwined with them.

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.

Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere.