George Perkins Marsh Quotes

No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation... We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that's fragile, that's only one, it's all we have... We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology.

Respect Mother Earth and her giving ways or trade away our children's days.

The peoples of the Andes believe in the concept of 'living well' instead of wanting to 'live better' by consuming more, regardless of the cost to our neighbors and our environment.

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

Harmony with land is like harmony with a friend; you cannot cherish his right hand and chop off his left.

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.

Conservation means the wise use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good of men.

We learn from our gardens to deal with the most urgent question of the time: How much is enough?

A life of stasis would be population control, combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you'll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn't sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren's grandchildren to live in.

Designers must be increasingly sensitive to our Earth's dwindling resources. It is our responsibility.

Let's care for the land and water, heal our cherished planet, and promote wellness for all of her people. Water is life. Let's protect the natural resources that our lives depend upon.

It is clear to me that unless we connect directly with the earth, we will not have the faintest clue why we should save it.

You know that the air and water are being polluted, as is everything we touch and live with, and we go on corrupting the nature that we need. We don't realize we have a commitment to God to take care of nature. To cut down a tree, to waste water when there is so much lack of it, to let buses poison our atmosphere with those noxious fumes from their exhausts, to burn rubbish haphazardly-all that concerns our alliance with God.

As long as we are graceful, appreciative lodgers, the earth remains healthy and wondrous.

A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and that the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanized, commercialized, urbanized way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet.

The immediate need for education and practice in using our natural resources of soil, forest, water, wildlife and areas of inspirational beauty to the best advantage of all, for this generation and others to come, is again apparent to every observant citizen.

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called Planet Earth. As we learn how we fit into the greater scheme of things, and begin to understand how the system works, we can plan ahead, we can use the resources responsibly, to show some respect for this inheritance that goes back 4.6 billion years.

What is the right of the huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey? Shall the fields and vallies, which a beneficent God has formed to teem with the life of innumerable multitudes, be condemned to everlasting barrenness?

We protect nature not for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities.

What odds does it make to the man who lives within Nature's bounds, whether he ploughs a hundred acres or a thousand?

We need to make growth greener, to make our economic and environmental policies more compatible and even mutually-reinforcing. This is not just a matter of new technologies or new sources of renewable, safe energy. It is about how we all behave every day of our lives, what we eat, what we drink, what we recycle, re-use, repair, how we produce and how we consume

We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.

The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.

The planet should not be used as a warehouse of resources to serve humanity's selfishness