Chief Seattle Quotes

We have not wondered enough at the delights God has given us to appreciate them, and be good stewards. We have overworked the land, poured pollutants into river and stream, fouled the air we breathe with gas fumes and chemical smoke spiraling up from industrial chimneys. We have sown the wind. We are reaping the whirlwind.

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

The planet isn't going anywhere. We are.

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.

The strong evidence is that we're running out of space. We're collectively affecting the world's climate. This is due to the still-growing human population and our increase in consumption.

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

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

It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.

A big ethical question is what happens after people stop using the device. Does it degrade the environment? Could it have been designed so it would actually be good for the environment?

Wild animals are just as confused as people are now. You've got toxins in the water, oil, sewage, all sorts of things.

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

We in the industrialized world make a greater difference because our ecological footprint, our impact on the condition of the environment, is 40 to 50 times larger than that of people in the developing world.

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

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

The more we exploit nature, The more our options are reduced, until we have only one: to fight for survival.

I believe that the end of things man-made cannot be very far away - must be near at hand.

Keep talking about moving toxic wastes, but never let it cross your mind to quit producing them. Keep Judging yourselves in Manson. Don't look in the mirror. You will serve the Earth as much as she serves you or you will commit suicide.

I watch people throw aluminum cans in the trash, and I think of all the stories I've heard about the over-mining of aluminum, the erosion that happens, and the trees that fall down.

Man's war against nature is a war against himself.

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