Ian Somerhalder Quotes

The environment is in us, not outside of us. The trees are our lungs, the rivers our bloodstream. We are all interconnected, and what you do to the environment ultimately you do to yourself.

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

The snake kills by squeezing very slowly. This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be.

The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.

As we kill nature, we are killing ourselves, and God incarnate as the world as well.

The tragedy is that there is so much more incentive - money - to destroy the ecology than there is to preserve it.

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

Even the wealth of the U.S. cannot protect against the levels of environmental destruction that we are unleashing.

Those trees are your lungs. The earth recycles as your body. The rivers recycle as your circulation. The air is your breath. So what do we call the environment?

The human family has invaluable friends and irreplaceable allies in the plant and animal worlds. We cannot continue to tug at the web of life without tearing a hole in the very fabric of our earthly existence - and eventually falling through that hole ourselves.

We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.

as a physician I examine the dying planet as I do a dying patient. The earth has a natural system of interacting homeostatic mechanisms similar to the human body's. If one system is diseased, like the ozone layer, then other systems develop abnormalities in function - the crops will die, the plankton will be damaged, and the eyes of all creatures on the planet will become diseased and vision impaired.

When man continues to destroy nature, he saws the very branch on which he sits since the rational protection of nature is at the same time the protection of mankind

If a person kills a tree before its time, it is like having murdered a soul.-Rabbi Nachman

We're a part of nature. As we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. It's a selfish thing to want to protect nature.

If we don't preserve forest habitat for spotted owls, then soon we won't have trees to refresh the air we breathe. And we're realizing that this applies to social ecology, as well.

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.

Forests are the world's air-conditioning system-the lungs of the planet-and we are on the verge of switching it off.

What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister? Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn And tied her with fences and dragged her down

The aggressive incoherence of our common surroundings can be described as entropy made visible. The way we have disposed things on the landscape leads us in the direction of disorder and death. They are categorically evil. These dispositions are destroying our only home-planet and other organisms that share it. They defeat our need to care about where we are and the things in place there. They prompt us to feel that civilization is not worth carrying on. They rob us of our identity and our will to live. These things are not about personal taste or style.

The very willow-rows lopped every three years for fuel or powder, - and every sizable pine and oak, or other forest tree, cut down within the memory of man! As if individual speculators were to be allowed to export the clouds out of the sky, or the stars out of the firmament, one by one. We shall be reduced to gnaw the very crust of the earth for nutriment.

Concern for the fate of the great rivers of the earth must lead us to reflect soberly on the model of development which our society is pursuing. A purely economic and technological understanding of progress, to the extent that it fails to acknowledge its intrinsic limitations and to take into consideration the integral good of humanity, will inevitably provoke negative consequences for individuals, peoples and creation itself.

The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.

In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.

Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.