Rachel Carson Quotes

We've poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We're running out of resources and we are running out of time.

We have a planet that is at risk, where resources don't have a permanent life. We are going to have to make the decision: are we going to survive or are we waiting for our extinction? One day we will wake up and find people are fighting not for oil but water.

To survive, humans need food, water, and air. Yet biodiversity, the Earth's bodies of water, and the planet's atmosphere are all under threat.

We are grossly wasting our energy resources and other precious raw materials as though their supply were infinite. We must even face the prospect of changing our basic ways of living. This change will either be made on our own initiative in a planned and rational way, or forced on us with chaos and suffering by the inexorable laws of nature.

We are killing our host the planet Earth.... I was once severely criticized for describing human beings as being the 'AIDS of the Earth.' I make no apologies for that statement.... We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.

If everybody on the planet today had the same standard of living as the average European or American, we would need three new planets. But we don't even have one new planet. We have this one, and with the way we're polluting it, the shrinking water resources, the climate change, the experimentation with plants... the outlook is grim.

At some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.

The message from all quarters is the same: our undisciplined consumption must end. If we continue to gobble up our resources without any regard to stewardship and to spew out our deadly wastes over land, sea, and air, we may well be drawing down the final curtain upon ourselves.

Natural disasters in Bolivia have been getting worse with the passage of time. It's brought about by a system: the capitalist system, the unbridled industrialization of the resources of the Planet Earth.

Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since.

We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons, and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found.

It's very important that people realize: the air is being taken away, the oceans are being taken away, the room is being taken away, but we're so worried about gas prices that we don't even see this stuff.

We have extracted from the land from the moment we stood on two feet. We are working to supply the kinds of materials that are necessary for the lives we've built for ourselves.

We put water down into the earth to push up gas, then we say, 'Ooh, we're having a water crisis.' This is foolishness, and this kind of foolishness, where we try to excuse human behavior, is dangerous.

Earth is embittered to us, that heaven may be endeared.

Today, our incentives aren't set up well - you can make a lot of money burning fossil fuels, digging up wetlands, pumping fossil water out of aquifers that will take 10,000 years to recharge, overfishing species in international waters that are close to collapse, and so on.

At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.

A way of life that ever more rapidly depletes the power of the Earth to sustain it and piles up ever more insoluble problems for each succeeding generation can only be called violent.

The essence of the problem is about consumption, recognizing that a society that consumes one-third of the world's resources is unsustainable. This level of consumption requires constant intervention into other people's lands. That's what's going on.

The greenhouse crisis is the bill coming due for the Industrial Revolution. It's not an accident. It's the logical outcome of our world view - the idea that we can control the forces of nature, that we can have short-term expedient gains without paying for them, that there are no limits to exploitation of the environment, that we can produce and consume faster than nature's ability to replenish.

All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.

We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted...So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life.

We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind.

Despite what you may have been taught about Indians or Africans or ancient Celts, poor people are terrible stewards of their environment. For instance, if my kid were starving to death, I would happily feed her fresh panda.

There are serious problems that have to do with the environment, that have to do with the way in which we live and consume.