James Salzman Quotes

Every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore,, Currents of debris upon my breast.

We can have technology, prosperity, nice homes and cars, but at the same time we must be conscious of what we are dumping into the water, the air and our food.

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

As cruel a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

Mercury is a dangerous toxin. It needs to be reduced.

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

The danger of dioxins in our environment, our food chain, and our bodies is difficult to illustrate, since they are not visible to the naked eye. My time in Vietnam allowed me to see the result of large quantities of them and therefore understand better the insidiousness of the smaller quantities that have found their way into our lives and bodies.

The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world-the very nature of its life.

We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals we disseminate widely in our environment?

Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.

I simply can't believe nice communities release effluents.

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

Mankind is considered (by the radical environmentalists) the lowest and the meanest of all species and is blamed for everything.

Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.

When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

I'm not really fond of the trails left in the sky and a lot of chemicals that are being pumped through factories and even in the clothes we wear.

Man is complex—he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

All life forms obey Nature's demands—except man, who has found ways of ignoring them.

Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.

The causal chain of the deterioration (of the environment) is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide---all can be traced easily to too many people.

The affluent society has become an effluent society. The 6 percent of the world's population in the United States produces 70 percent or more of the world's solid wastes

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.

The great task for environmental historians is to record and analyze the effects of man's recently achieved control over the natural world. What is needed is a longer-term global, comparative, historical perspective that treats the environment as a meaningful variable.