John Burroughs Quotes

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.

The planet's environmental woes tend to be overlooked as we scramble for the latest high-tech gizmos - and conveniently ignore their energy consumption.

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

This is a story of government failurew, intransigence, unpreparedness, delay, inaction, and environmental injustice.

Year by year, more and more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. We have played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it.

The growing possibility of our destroying ourselves and the world with our own neglect and excess is tragic and very real.

Certain types of decisions can be safely ignored. Some issues will go away with the passage of time, others will be so slow developing that the decision-makers will depart before the results of their neglect becomes manifest. Which brings us to the environment.

Air pollution is turning Mother Nature prematurely gray.

You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.

We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it.... That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-month basis, we would have been evicted long ago.

Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it.

A careless shoe string, in whose tie I see a wilde civility.

In America, I don't know how much longer the environment is going to exist. I sort of strongly believe that we're in danger.

The latest computer modeling I've seen indicates that at mid-century, there might be 150 million people classified as "environmental refugees."

The degradation of our environment is undeniably a direct result of our lack of regard, lack of accountability, and lack of responsibility.

Such prosperity as we have known it up to the present is the consequence of rapidly spending the planet's irreplaceable capital.

Much of the economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.

Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

Human society cannot basically stop the destruction of the environment under capitalism. Socialism is the only structure that makes it possible.

The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man.

Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.

If we are really serious about protecting the environment, the discharge pipes and stacks of industry would all plug directly into their intake side, and costs would not be externalized to a voiceless environment.

Corporate globalists and the corporate empires they serve may be at the cutting edge of technological innovation, but socially and environmentally they are relics of a bygone era of imperial colonial rule, elite privilege, and state-sanctioned plunder.

If our salmon are not healthy, then our watersheds are not healthy-and if our watersheds our not healthy, then we have truly squandered our heritage and mortgaged our future.