Winona LaDuke Quotes

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

In some cases, it's not just about cleaning up the factories. It's about cleaning up the nearby rivers and lakes that have been tainted with heavy metals.

The affluent society has become an effluent society. The 6 percent of the world's population in the United States produces 70 percent or more of the world's solid wastes

Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.

Why did they pick the [Indian] Reservations to lay down their pipeline? They were probably thinking the indigenous people were not going to stand up.

Hinkley will be a ghost town. It will be another town lost in America due to pollution.

E-waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the United States and can pose serious environmental and health problems here and around the world when not handled properly.

This junkyard is an environmental nightmare, strewn with tree stumps, old tires, derelict vehicles, scrap metal and other waste. This owner may be failing to properly dispose of vehicle fluids and other contaminating chemical-laden trash, possibly imperiling groundwater and wells. He is junking the law as well as the environment.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

Brothers and Sisters: Our ancient homeland is spotted today with an array of chemical dumps. Along the Niagara River, dioxin, a particularly deadly substance, threatens the remaining life there and in the waters which flow from there. Forestry departments spray the surviving forests with powerful insecticides to encourage tourism by people seeking a few days or weeks away from the cities where the air hangs heavy with sulphur and carbon oxides.

Of course, as consumers, we want cheap and good products; however, if these production processes are exceeding wastewater discharge standards and even causing heavy metal pollution, they will cause long-lasting damage to the ecological environment and public health.

Wealth and vegetation go together, and that exacerbates environmental injustice. The poor bear the burden of degraded environments.

I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to it.

China is bearing the environmental cost for much of the world because China is the factory of the world.

I feel greatly at fault in not having made a loud public protest about Belle Glade before this.

Economists treat economics as if it is a pure science divorced from the facts of life. The result of this false accountancy is a willful confusion under cover of which industry wreaks its havoc scot-free and ignores the environmental cost.

In order to produce enough gold to create a wedding band, … a mine would have to extract tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds of ore. … each mine produces thousands of tons of waste rock and other materials. The end result is that mines across the West create millions of tons of waste. This waste is usually stored on the earth's surface in vast piles that may be hundreds of feet high and cover an area the size of several football fields.

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

We can no longer throw our waste away because there is no away.

If the rest of the world aspires to our way of life ... we'll bury ourselves in waste.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

Solution to pollution by dilution is fallacious.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.

I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it, if it creates radiation.