Paul Gillmor Quotes

But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

The cheap and easy days of waste disposal are over.

It is hard to see taxing plastic bags as one of the great issues of our time that merits the foremost place in our finest statesmen's minds. It is an absurd little issue, a picayune proportion of household waste, and a pointless inconvenience in people's lives.

Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.

We can't have landfills forever, and we can't ask others to accept our trash.

I'd do a show about garbagemen if it was good!

Just because you have a piece of trash and you throw it away and it gets hauled away, it doesn't mean that it's not affecting someone else.

I have always been interested in garbage: What it says about us. What in there embarrasses us, and what we can't bear to part with. Where it goes and how much of it there is. How it endures. What it might be like to work with it every day.

I come from garbage.

A newspaper that you're not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn't think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.

But in the long run we're not going to be able to keep out of state trash away from Pennsylvania.

I'll tell you what me scares me is plastic. Plastic bags and plastic bottles and these things. Why does my water have to be in a bloody plastic bottle? The landfill and the ocean. And I don't know, I'm just terrified with the proliferation of plastic.

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.

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

We're not going to allow Virginia to become a trash depository for New York or anyplace else.

Some environmentalists demands are counter productive. Avoiding pesticides for example means farming more land less efficiently, which leads to higher prices, more hunger, more disease …, and less biodiversity.

Government Enviornmental poisitions are tradeoffs. In that process, Democrats tend to worry more about the harm done to the enviornment and the health of the people; Republicans tend to worry more about harm to business and the economy.

In future irrigation schemes, water drainage and removal systems should be budgeted from the start of the project. Unfortunately, adding such costs to the original project often will result in a poor return on investment. Society then will have to decide how much it is willing to subsidize new irrigation development.

I'm a trash can. I eat whatever makes me happy.

Americans who want a healthy and clean environment expect lawful, effective, and economically sound regulation - the Clean Power Plan failed on all three counts.

Prediction is a mug's game, but taking the side of water polluters has not been a winning political strategy for 50 years. Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all undertook to weaken water regulations in the name of economic growth. They left office; the regulations remained.

Unmanageable waste has turned into a worldwide crisis. No matter how much local authorities do, no matter the level of public cooperation, no matter how much is recycled, the problem continues to grow.

The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense. One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else.

Sooner or later, all magazines end up in the toilet.

Cap-and-trade is a dangerous policy fraught with the potential for significant corruption, and it would hurt my constituents and our economy by raising energy costs.