Edward Abbey Quotes

Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man?

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

I think we need to take responsibility for the things we put on this planet, and also take responsibility for the things we take off the planet. We need to have limiters on how far we allow ourselves to go - ethical, moral limiters.

If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

Our biggest moral debt is to the environment. Take-take-take, nothing given back.

We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need.

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.

We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.

Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.

If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

The heart of our relationship, this natural environment that has blessed us really all along the west coast of North America, on both sides of the border we've realized that this incredible natural wealth comes with a price.

There's one fundamental law that all of nature obeys that mankind breaks every day. Now, this is a law that's evolved over billions of years, and the law is this: Nothing in nature takes more than it needs.

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.

Our livelihood is intimately tied to the food we eat, water we drink and places where we recreate. That's why we have to promote responsibility and conservation when it comes to our natural resources.

What we've proven is that you can protect the environment, use it wisely and grow the economy and that there is no conflict between the two.

Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.

We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

We have a moral obligation to straighten out the world before we mess up space.

Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.