Bruce Babbitt Quotes

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

Right now there should be a moratorium on the cutting down of old growth in this country. That is a small thing to ask at this point. There is only four percent of old growth left. Ninety-six percent of it has been cut down.

Maintaining healthy forests is essential to those who make a living from the land and for those of us who use them for recreational purposes.

As a nation we have not yet come to have a proper respect for the forest and to regard it as an indispensable part of our resources—one which is easily destroyed but difficult to replace; one which confers great benefits while it endures, but whose disappearance is accompanied by a train of evil consequences not readily foreseen and positively irreparable.

Reversing deforestation is complicated; planting a tree is simple.

If you have forest, if you have green forest, the water table goes up. What happens with deforestation is the water level goes down and we all know how much importance drinking water has.

Our government has done nothing effective with its forests, though the best in the world, but is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a magnificent estate in perfect order, and then has left his rich fields and meadows, forests and parks, to be sold and plundered and wasted at will …

Every acre of forest should belong to the people.

There is more old growth forest today in California today than there was in 1850. The Indians had destroyed most of them.

Our forest policy is not to preserve forests because they are beautiful—though that is a good in itself—not to preserve them because they are refuges for wild creatures of the wilderness—though that is a good in itself—but rather to conserve them in order to guarantee a steady and continuous supply of timber, grass, and above all, water.

The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree. It's so much easier to cut one down than to grow one. And so it's worth interrogating every time we do it.

The key to our oldest woodland is that it has been cut down and regrown, in some cases as often as 50 or 60 times. It is one of the most perfectly sustainable resources and ecosystems known to man.

I'm not an extreme tree-hugger. I do believe trees grow and are a useful agricultural product that can be harvested without damaging the ecology and wildlife.

You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus.

Promoting the use of sustainable and renewable rainforest products can help to stop rainforest devastation. The rainforests are much more valuable alive than cut or burned, providing a steady supply of medicinal plants, fruits, nuts and oils.

Look at timber prices in the late '90s, at around $50. If you count the true damage of cutting down forests, the resultant flooding, insurance claims, and so on, then the timber price should have been $100.

Congo, my country, has the largest forest in Africa, maybe the second-largest in the world. I was born in a forest area, and when I was growing up, I assisted my uncle, who was a poacher. That was good, because it grew my passion for protecting the forest and plants.

There's a general culture in this country to cut all the trees. It makes me so angry because everyone is cutting and no one is planting.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

If I have my way, I'm going to dissolve the Forest Service. They're in the business of harvesting trees and they're not harvesting trees, so why have them anymore?

Even if one tree falls down it wouldn't affect the entire forest.

You can cut a tree down, and it grows back. Once a species goes, it's gone forever.

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world.

Except on their southern borders the great northern forests are not good as a permanent home for man.

Our performance should be based on the long-term health of the land, rather than the number of board feet produced.