Theodore Roosevelt Quotes

We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

Just as our forefathers saved and invested to build what we, the current generation, are enjoying today, so, too, we must plant trees so that our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters, can enjoy the shade.

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.

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.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.

If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.

If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

The heart of our relationship, this natural environment that has blessed us really all along the west coast of North America, on both sides of the border we've realized that this incredible natural wealth comes with a price.

There's one fundamental law that all of nature obeys that mankind breaks every day. Now, this is a law that's evolved over billions of years, and the law is this: Nothing in nature takes more than it needs.

Our livelihood is intimately tied to the food we eat, water we drink and places where we recreate. That's why we have to promote responsibility and conservation when it comes to our natural resources.

The term 'natural resources' confuses people. 'Natural resources' are not like a finite number of gifts under the Christmas tree. Nature is given, but resources are created.

What would help us preserve our natural resources are genetic traits that let us sacrifice the present for the sake of the future. You need wisdom to sacrifice something that is immediately useful or advantageous for the sake of something that will be important in the future.

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.

Everyone lives downstream from someone else.

Land is not something you inherit from your parents. It is something you borrow from your children.

Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

No nation has ever aggressively and intensely exploited national resources over such a great area as has the United States.

I think that, on the whole, risk-taking entrepreneurial characters regard nature as a sort of background that we can use for our own advantage.

The E.P.A. is too important to treat like a reality TV show. People's lives and our country's resources are at stake.

In Hawaii we understand why it is important to malama, or take care of, our land, ocean, and air - our way of life depends on it.