George Vancouver Quotes

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

Despite their lack of visual impact, headline sex-appeal, and their 'out of sight, out of mind' nature, we should all care about aquatic dead zones because we are all connected to their causes and we all feel their impacts.

When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.

Man is a complex animal; he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

We have done extraordinary things to destroy our waters. We can never do enough to research and coordinate cleaning these waters up.

The Delaware Estuary has sustained a human population for thousands of years, but by the end of the 19th Century, increased population and industrialization had transformed much of the upper Estuary watershed.

Imagine if Congress always put the interests of polluters ahead of the health of our families. Our rivers and lakes would be choked with sewage. Acid rain would pour down from smog-filled skies. Hundreds of thousands more of our neighbors, friends, and loved ones would be victims of cancer, heart disease, and asthma.

Far and away, the greatest threat to the ocean, and thus to ourselves, is ignorance. But we can do something about that.

The sea is the universal sewer.

We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we've smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don't think it's our privilege to behave this way.

I'm developing a physiological theory of growth and oxygen requirement. If it's well-understood how fish require oxygen to grow, then we can understand how to deal with the impact of global warming.

I needed to explain that Louisiana's coast accepts the drainage from two-thirds of the United States and, while the necessary levees constructed upstream have prevented floods, they have also contributed to problems downstream.

We live in an epoch of denudation.

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.

Over the last several decades, human activity have so altered the basic chemistry of the seas that they are now experiencing evolution in reverse to the barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago.

There are air-quality issues that cross state lines. There are water-quality issues, obviously, that cross state lines.

Harmful Algal Blooms are a serious environmental and economic threat to New Jersey.

I'm not very proud of coming from a place that everyone thinks is this pure green country whereas, in reality, all our lakes and waterways are poison.

Overfishing, global warming and pollution are destroying the ocean.

At nine, I started catching fish in Vancouver full of tumours from toxins.

Water is an issue, and, clearly, what's happening with the filth in our environment and the levels of carbon monoxide in our atmosphere are the really scary issues right now, the very troubling ones.

I will be very sad when global warming and toxins kill off all the toads and frogs and salamanders. Here's hoping we, as humans, figure out a way to be less stupid.

When geologists announced the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, humans destroying the environment, one of the main things they pointed to is the use of plastics in the earth.

We humans have this idea that the ocean is so big, so vast, so resilient that it doesn't matter what we do to it. That may have been true 1,000 years ago. But in the last 100, especially the last 50 years, we have destroyed the assets that make our lives possible.

Now our biggest environmental problems come from our own actions, our own choices, rather than pollution produced by big business.