Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.

Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.

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.

Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.

Let us face it, there is no law in any country - to my knowledge - that makes it illegal to clear-cut forests, nor to erode our topsoil, nor to generate greenhouse gases over and above that which can be absorbed by dwindling natural sinks. What is more, even if such laws were enacted, I can see no effective mechanism anywhere in the world for applying them.

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.

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

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Wouldn't it help Americans more, in the long run, if we were forced to accept some responsibility for the environmental wreckage we prefer to assume is totally out of our control?

A fascinating challenge facing today's environmental movement is how to best approach the reversal of past decisions that altered once-pristine environmental spaces for the sake of urgent man-made needs.

I think there are changes in the environment. There are a lot of items to contribute to it.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

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

Why are ecologists and environmentalists so feared and hated? This is because in part what they have to say is new to the general public, and the new is always alarming.

Mother Nature comes up against reality, and the reality is that the system doesn't work.

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

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?

The environmental crisis is all a result of rushing.

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant.

I do believe very strongly that all of us and all of the other things in the context of our planet with Mother Nature, all of these things absolutely have a profound effect.

Mother Nature is not sweet.