Utah Phillips Quotes

We all see that, today, man can destroy the foundation of his existence: his Earth.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.

It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness.

I don't think the planet can survive people. It's not the other way around. I don't think the planet can survive.

We humans are the greatest of earth's parasites.

I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

What we're doing to the planet is inexcusable.

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.

For 200 years we've been conquering nature. Now we're beating it to death.

Today, the tide has turned, we are destroying them.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet - the only one in the whole Milky Way - with a century of transportation whoopee.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts.

There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

The causal chain of the deterioration (of the environment) is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide---all can be traced easily to too many people.

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

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.

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.

Even the wealth of the U.S. cannot protect against the levels of environmental destruction that we are unleashing.

We're going to stop looking at Earth from orbit because we don't like what we are seeing and the conclusions that leads us to? That's nonsense.

We've poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We're running out of resources and we are running out of time.

This planet is our home and we're trashing and killing it.