Jacques Cousteau Quotes

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

White males are the most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today.

The white man is destroying the world.

The causal chain of the deterioration (of the environment) is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide---all can be traced easily to too many people.

The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century

The world's forests are being destroyed at the rate of one football field's worth every second. One Tennessee's worth every year.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

Mankind is considered (by the radical environmentalists) the lowest and the meanest of all species and is blamed for everything.

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

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

Our planetary system is affected by a magnitude of force as powerful as any naturally occurring global catastrophe, but one caused solely by a single species: us.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

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

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.

We have chosen to bring future generations into this world of rising seas and warming temperatures, droughts and floods, heat waves and wildfires, a world in which one in four mammals and one in eight birds are at risk of disappearing forever. While the damage we've done is irreversible, that doesn't give us the right to do nothing.

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we've smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don't think it's our privilege to behave this way.

Almost all these hotspots around the world, most have been destroyed to the point where there is no wildlife and very little of the natural world left.

To be clear, climate change is a true 800 pound gorilla in the room. The effects of global warming threaten global environmental upheaval over the coming century. But for South Florida and the Everglades, it could be our death knell if urgent action is not taken.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on Earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data.

On this ancient and miraculous world, where such beautiful natural and living things have evolved, something has gone wrong when life itself is used as a manufacturing process.

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.

With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.

Nature stopped being natural decades ago.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.