George Perkins Marsh Quotes

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

Man is complex—he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

Man's war against nature is a war against himself.

Strip mining is man’s thorough and total assault upon his planet.

Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.

The 20th century peatlands ditching in Finland was the worst human environmental destruction action in Europe.

If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.

Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.

Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore,, Currents of debris upon my breast.

As cruel a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

When geologists announced the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, humans destroying the environment, one of the main things they pointed to is the use of plastics in the earth.

Because normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.

Man marks the earth with ruin - his control stops with the shore.

We have vexed and bothered every plant and every animal on every continent.

Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.

We've raped our homelands to maintain our economies.

The landscape has been so transformed by ignorance, arrogance and greed that those who must prove their case are not those who call for forest protection, but those who call for business as usual.

I shall never come back to Arizona. The main reason is that the country has been ruined by motorists. The Navajos are doomed. The beauty and the romance of their lives is dead.

In former times humans had fear of the future. Today the future must have fear of humans.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.

The loss of global biological diversity is advancing at an unprecedented pace.