Rachel Carson Quotes

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

I think that, on the whole, risk-taking entrepreneurial characters regard nature as a sort of background that we can use for our own advantage.

Everyone goes to the forest; some go for a walk to be inspired, and others go to cut down the trees.

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

The idea that we're somehow centrally important to the planet's existence is pretty comical - although I'd like us to be.

The Anthropocentic Age - the first age in which humankind is the dominant species on the planet - cuts both ways: it is up to us to destroy or save the planet. We certainly have the ability.

The Fur Company may be called the exterminating medium of these wild and almost uninhabitable regions, which cupidity or the love of money alone would induce man to venture into. Where can I now go and find nature undisturbed?

The more we exploit nature, The more our options are reduced, until we have only one: to fight for survival.

Nature was developed to resist the onslaughts of capitalism, but it's really not a very good defense - rather like resisting a steamroller with a Christmas tree ornament.

The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree. It's so much easier to cut one down than to grow one. And so it's worth interrogating every time we do it.

The planet isn't going anywhere. We are.

Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.

Nature is actually resilient, if we take care to just stop actively destroying it.

Ecology is boring for the same reason that destruction is fun.

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?

Children, be worried when they call you America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they've done to the other natural resources?

Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.

A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves-these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation.

I can't think of a greater legacy than, "Because you lived, another species survived."

Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.

Not only has wilderness been a force in molding our character as a people, but its influence continues, and will, if we are wise enough to preserve it on this continent, be a stabilizing power as well as a spiritual reserve for the future.

Folks who are alive today need to wake up and do what they can to stop abusing the planet, and find ways to preserve the web of life. That's where the soul is headed. It is time for us to become wounded healers.

It is the system, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation. My prison-house environment is but another manifestation of the Midas-hand, whose cursed touch turns everything to the brutal service of Mammon.

Respecting beings, places, and life ways would be a basis for a worthy systemic analysis. And such an analysis would be inherently conservative, assuming that technology - from the fire stick to the silicon chip - is apt to do more harm to the Whole than good.

If the entire world decided to become vegan tomorrow, a whole host of the world's problems would disappear overnight. Climate change would decrease by 25 percent, deforestation would cease, rainforests would be preserved, our water- and air-quality would increase, life-expectancy rates would increase, and our rates of cancer would plummet, so certainly, with that one action of becoming vegan you are quite effectively making the world a better place.