Pete Seeger Quotes

I plant a lot of trees. I am a great believer in planting things for future generations. I loathe the now culture where you just live for today.

The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live.

If, in our haste to 'progress,' the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America. We cannot afford an America where expedience tramples upon esthetics and development decisions are made with an eye only on the present.

Environmentalism isn't a discipline or specialty. It's a way of seeing our place in the world. And we need everybody to see the world that way. Don't think 'In order to make a difference I have to become an environmentalist.'

Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are 'chosen', the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.

We need to broaden our sympathies both in space and time - and perceive ourselves as part of a long heritage, and stewards for an immense future.

A lot of people think they need to give up nature to become adults but that's not true. However, you have to be careful how you describe and define 'nature.'

The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

When you talk to the public about the environment it goes in one ear and out the other. They are only interested in the now.

Governments, however, must think not only of the present, but of the rights of future generations.

In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

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.

Your evolutionary heuristics come back to the idea of a future roughly similar to what it is now. You give to the community as it is now, to benefit a similar community in the future.

It's a wonderful experience to look at our Earth.

If people insist on living as if there's no tomorrow, there really won't be one.

I think it is important that we all try and be green where it is possible; an awareness of the world around us can never be a bad thing.

We are not talking about esthetics. We are talking about life: survival of Man. We must train young people to get another vision of Nature. We call it 'wilderness,' and we think it is progress to get further and further away from it. How crazy! Where would we have been if Nature had not built us up?

We do not need to plan or devise a "world of the future"; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid "futurology" available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at "the future of the human race"; we have the same pressing need that we have always had - to love, care for, and teach our children.

Energy literacy means you can see the waste in disposing of a plastic bottle after you've drunk water from some place on the other side of the world.

Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.

We ... must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow.

In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, we must in turn plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will benefit the generations to come.

I think the environment is possibly our most worrying thing at the moment, so I think mountaintops are the place to live.

I've always been very aware of environment. When I was a kid I wanted to be a marine biologist until I realized I hated being underwater. I think a lot of that came from traveling and seeing the levels of waste produced by so many factories around the world.