Helen Caldicott Quotes

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

From my travels around the world I have seen how much damage and pollution is done by the careless disposal of waste. It is also evident that we in the West produce far more and throw away far more than the developing world, almost without thinking

Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

Where man had been, in every place he left, garbage remained. Even in his pursuit of the ultimate truth and quest for his God, he produced garbage. By his garbage, which lay stratum upon stratum, he could always - one had only to dig - be known. For more long-lived than man is his refuse. Garbage alone lives after him.

Ours is certainly not an old culture. Yet in recent decades we've used more energy, destroyed more soil, created more pathogenicity (temporarily stopped some too, for sure), mutated more bacteria, and dumped more toxicity on the planet than all the cultures before us-combined. I love the United States, but I am not blind to the wrongs. I have no desire to live anywhere else, but that doesn't mean I think everything we're doing should be done or can be maintained.

Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter.

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use.

If they [the Federal government] can't handle the [toxic] waste, they shouldn't generate it.

The only thing to do is say, "If you generate it in your country, you take care of it.

The United States has consumed in the last 50 years more natural resources than the rest of the entire human race for all of history.

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

If the rest of the world aspires to our way of life ... we'll bury ourselves in waste.

What is truly frightening is that, despite our knowledge, we continue to subsidize activities without regard to their environmental—and economic—impact.

The oil market is the biggest failure of the free market because it did not take into account the environmental damage.

Solution to pollution by dilution is fallacious.

I have always seen pollution as theft.

We are being choked to death by the amount of plastic that we throw away. It's killing our oceans. It's entering into our bodies in the fish we eat.

I think all the garbage in the world is thanks to a very small handful of idiots.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses.

Hinkley will be a ghost town. It will be another town lost in America due to pollution.

Sometimes I wake at 2 A.M. worrying that my great-granddaughter will have to march through her distant, broiling future gathering all the plastic I ever disposed of.

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.

When you start traveling and thinking from a global perspective, you realize how small the planet is and how predatory we are to its ecology.

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.