Garrett Hardin Quotes

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

True conservation means protecting the entire habitat.

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

I realize the answer is not to create wilderness and walk away.

Environmentalism is a form of pagan fundamentalism. These green wackos are fanatics like al-Quaida. Just like them.

Raising awareness on the most pressing environmental issues of our time is more important than ever.

I'm very concerned for the future of the earth and its amazing creatures. We've got to be careful and make sure we don't foul our own nest.

I am an environmentalist, but I'm not a wacko environmentalist. I believe that mankind and nature can live side-by-side for the mutual benefit of both.

I don't think we're going to save anything if we go around talking about saving plants and animals only; we've got to translate that into what's in it for us.

Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.

We can have technology, prosperity, nice homes and cars, but at the same time we must be conscious of what we are dumping into the water, the air and our food.

The future will either be green or not at all.

Every time I have some moment on a seashore, or in the mountains, or sometimes in a quiet forest, I think this is why the environment has to be preserved.

I think the government has to reposition environment on top of their national and international priorities.

Environmental policy must strike a balance between the earth's best interests and our citizen's pressing needs.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

India's elite wants not just cosmetic environmentalism, but a consumer-environmentalism. It wants to have good areas to go for tourism to. So it's happy to have national parks, because people can go for wildlife tourism. Or good beaches. But they don't want, and don't care about, a livelihood environmentalism.

The relation of the conservation of natural resources to the problems of National welfare and National efficiency had not yet dawned on the public mind. The reclamation of arid public lands in the West was still a matter for private enterprise alone; and our magnificent river system, with its superb possibilities for public usefulness, was dealt with by the National Government not as a unit, but as a disconnected series of pork-barrel problems, whose only real interest was in their effect on the re-election or defeat of a Congressman here and there—a theory which, I regret to say, still obtains.

The forests shall not be burned needlessly.

To protect the natural environment is to protect the possibilities for youth.

What’s been going on for years is political science, not good science in the environmental area.

No compromise in defense of Mother Earth.

The environment is more than just nature. The environment is peoples needs.

Everyone realizes that we have to clean up the environment, but no one likes the cost.

No-one wants polluted air, water or land, denuded forests or extinct animal species. But the error most people make is to trust the legislature to prevent these tragedies. What they don’t realize is how big a role the legislature has played historically in causing environmental destruction.