Harry M. Caudill Quotes

The nation's coal is stained with blood.

Strip mining is man’s thorough and total assault upon his planet.

We just can't afford to sit back and watch all that land be destroyed so a few people can get rich now. One of these days the dear old federal government is going to have to come in and spend billions of dollars just to repair the damage that's already been done. And guess who will have the machines and the workmen to do the job? The same coal operators who made the mess in the first place will be hired to fix it back, and the taxpayers will bear the cost

Runaway technology, whose only law is profit, has for years poisoned our air, ravaged our soil, stripped our forests bare, and corrupted our water resources

We're in a war, the war of industrial civilization against the natural world.

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, / For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. / America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, / And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

People who work in diamonds and in oil wreck a lot of the Earth and a lot of the people on it.

The extraction of oil, coal and minerals brought, and still brings, a cost to the environment.

The history of fossil-fuel development has always been that certain people are expendable. What's changed is that new, larger populations are now considered expendable.

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

The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

The coal mining industry is very destructive and it doesn't have to be.

Mountaintop removal coal operations enrich only a handful of elites while impoverishing everyone else in their proximity.

Fracking kills, and it doesn't just kill us. It kills the land, nature and, eventually, the whole world.

There's no longer any surprise in noting that China has grave environmental problems.

There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.

Even the biggest coal boosters have long admitted that coal is a dying industry - the fight has always been over how fast and how hard the industry will fall.

The commencement of coal mining at Parsa Kente is a milestone event in coal mining sector.

America's industrial strength was built on burning coal. No politician wanted to mess with coal.

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

The landscape has been so transformed by ignorance, arrogance and greed that those who must prove their case are not those who call for forest protection, but those who call for business as usual.

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

The carbon lobby knew perfectly well that global warming posed real dangers, but it chose to deny those dangers and disparage anyone who sought to bring them to public attention. The lobby put its immediate economic interests ahead of humanity’s future well-being.

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.”