Michael Pollan Quotes

When you look at farmers and ranchers, for example, they are our first environmentalists. They are our first conservationists. When you look at the greatest asset that they have, it is their land. They care about the water that they drink. They care about the air that they breathe. We should see them as partners, not adversaries.

If we moved from industrialized agriculture to re-localized organic agriculture, we could sequester about one quarter of the carbon moving into the air and destroying our glaciers, oceans, forests and lands.

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

… as a nation we haven't expected our government to show foresight in the development of the land. We have allowed individuals to do as they thought best and they could hardly be expected to have an altruistic attitude on the future. Now we are faced with lands that must be returned to buffalo grass or trees in order to prevent the suffering which many of our people are enduring today. All of us will gladly help in the emergency but I hope we will do more than that, and set ourselves to studying the things which have caused these conditions and never rest until our government remedies them.

Depending on how you farm, your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon.

I have been a long-term environmental advocate for the agriculture industry. I have particularly tried to push carbon farming or carbon sequestration.

Farmers can't plant much more land because almost every accessible acre of arable soil is already in use. Nor can the use of fertilizer be increased: it is already being overused everywhere except some parts of Africa, and the runoff is polluting rivers, lakes, and oceans.

Large-scale deforestation can be prevented while increasing food production through better, smarter agriculture.

Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA has the ability to more stringently regulate dust. If the EPA determines more stringent standards are necessary, family farmers and ranchers, as well as rural economies, would be devastated.

If we tackle deforestation in the right way, the benefits will be far-reaching - greater food security, improved livelihoods for millions of small farmers and indigenous people, more prosperous rural economies, and above all, a more stable climate.

The planet needs trees. If there is indeed that carbon dioxide out there in the atmosphere, the only species on the planet that can actually trap it for us in a natural process of photosynthesis are the trees.

To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.

The farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself.

A level of no more than 350 ppm is still feasible, with the help of reforestation and improved agricultural practices, but just barely - time is running out.

When the land is cultivated entirely by the spade and no horses are kept, a cow is kept for every three acres of land.

What we need to do is stop global warming; that's the only way to stop your peanut butter cups from melting... And if that doesn't do the trick, then put them in the fridge... Or better yet, eat them.

We cannot hope to either understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

When it comes to the environment and global warming from emissions, it has to be dealt with in one of two ways - preemptive regulations, which I don't agree with, or with private property principles. Nobody has the right to pollute their neighbors' air or water or land.

Most scientists know what needs to be done to save our Earth. But the politicians don't listen to them. They will listen to popular pressure; the people got to supply that.

This fair homestead has fallen to us, and how little have we done to improve it, how little have we cleared and hedged and ditched! We are too inclined to go hence to a "better land," without lifting a finger, as our farmers are moving to the Ohio soil; but would it not be more heroic and faithful to till and redeem this New England soil of the world?

I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes hills and streams and plains the mountains over our land and nature's wealth deep under the earth are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.

Pat Robertson had decided that global warming was real and we need to do something about it struck me as powerful evidence that the Holy Spirit is hard at work in this question.

The interests of Oregon for today and in the future must be protected from the grasping wastrels of the land. We must respect another truism - that unlimited and unregulated growth, leads inexorably to a lowered quality of life.