Robert Adams Quotes

I think the Netherlands will become one big city at a point. It is inevitable when you live in a country with so many people. You cannot afford to leave nature as it is. Some people believe that the dunes should be left in their original state, but I think it's strange to let things become how they were 500 years ago.

I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.

Why is it that the destruction of something created by humans is called vandalism, yet the destruction of something created by God is called development?

Natural capital is easy to overlook because it is the pond we swim in. One can live perfectly well without ever giving a thought to the sulfur cycle or wetland functions. Only when the benefits nature provides are disrupted do we take notice.

America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious.

Everybody's seen a stream or a wood they knew replaced by a strip mall.

The first thing many tourists see in Hawaii is concrete - a long dreary stretch of it through landscapes dominated by sad, cheap apartment buildings and almost entirely denuded of plant life.

If you represent the Earth's lifetime by a single year, say from January when it was made to December, the 21st-century would be a quarter of a second in June - a tiny fraction of the year. But even in this concertinaed cosmic perspective, our century is very, very special: the first when humans can change themselves and their home planet.

I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it's a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.

I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn't changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament.

Archeology and ecology can go hand in hand.

'Air' is what the world looks like: An inconvenient mashup of human politics and divine geography. We leave bits and pieces of ourselves and our history in every place we encounter.

Business was bound to come; light industries were already shopping for land. The quiet country farms were already going, and developments would take over... Eventually, of course, we will have to have some sort of plan to guide future development.

We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

My work is about the world I live in. So, I sort of make a picture of my life or our lives. I'm always looking for something that is overlooked, so I need to constantly be aware of what's going on.

When I saw the Earth from above, personally, as a spacecraft operator, it certainly reinforced and drove home the fact that there's one place where we can live right now.

New roads carve up the countryside, dispelling peace, creating a penumbra of noise, pollution and ugliness. Their effects spread for many miles.

We had this incredible pass over the Himalayas, and to just see all of that pollution that's riding up against those mountains from the south is just really heartbreaking.

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

I think we get used to not seeing the green things around us. I think they become the backdrop of our lives. And I think you actively have to ask somebody to request that they put that in the foreground.

It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born

Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic.

When I was about fifteen, I went to work at Yosemite National Park. It changed me forever. Nature had carved its own sculpture, and I was part of it, not the other way around.

We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.