Jeff Vandermeer Quotes

Most of the news about the state of the environment is pretty ugly. This is frightening for me personally, but actually motivational for me artistically.

Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.

We're the only species that have crapped up the planet and the only species that can clean it up.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

I will be very sad when global warming and toxins kill off all the toads and frogs and salamanders. Here's hoping we, as humans, figure out a way to be less stupid.

If the tea party folks would go out there and get angry because they think their taxes are too high, for God's sake, a lot of citizens ought to get angry about the fact that they're being killed and our planet's being injured by what's happening on a daily basis by the way we provide our power and our fuel and the old practices that we have. That's something worth getting angry about.

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.

I feel a desperation to make people see what we are doing to the environment, what a mess we are making of our world. At this point, the more people I reach, the more I accomplish. ... I miss Gombe and my wonderful years in the forest But if I were to go back to that, I wouldn't feel I was doing what I should be doing.

Many conservatives, I think, see action on climate change as really an attack on a way of life. That's really a hard pill to swallow, that the whole way that I have created my life is wrong, you're saying, that I shouldn't have this house in the suburb, I shouldn't be driving this car.

I feel we are so blessed to live in a country where we enjoy so many rights that other countries cannot even begin to imagine. However, it terrifies me that we seem to have lost touch with our connection to the earth. I am concerned that we have risen to such heights of arrogance in our refusal to acknowledge that our earth is rapidly changing in ways that might affect us catastrophically but instead, we hold steadfast to our belief that nothing can happen to us as a people.

Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment, people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past ... [A] new ecological awareness is beginning to emerge which rather than being downplayed, ought to be encouraged to develop into concrete programs and initiatives.

If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth, we would stop immediately.

I realize the answer is not to create wilderness and walk away.

The latest revelation - from no Mount Sinai, Sermon on the Mount or Bo tree - is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what that creation once was.

When you take on something like your footprint on the environment, you have to say, 'Where am I going to draw the circle around my level of responsibility and then where do I assume that others will take responsibility?'

I'm an old member of Greenpeace. I worried intensely, as I think most of my friends did, that the world was coming apart.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

Unless we connect directly with the earth, we will not have the faintest clue why we should save it…. Only if we understand the beauty of nature will we love it, and only if we become alerted to learn about the planet's disease processes can we decide to live our lives with a proper sense of ecological responsibility.

For many years, wildlife film-making has presented a pristine living world. It has created an impression of security and abundance, even in places afflicted by cascading ecological collapse.

Shouldn't the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?

We're going to stop looking at Earth from orbit because we don't like what we are seeing and the conclusions that leads us to? That's nonsense.

What I wonder most about the Anthropocene is not when did it start - but when, and how, will it end? Will it end? Or is it possible that our own growing awareness of our role on Earth can itself play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome toward one that we would desire?

Climate change has been immense difficulties of pains or illness or hard life on this planet. So through that way, you have sense of concern of the well being, not sky, not just the environment itself.

The very fact that the planet is probably unsustainable with all that we've done to it and are doing to it, it's an appalling piece of evidence. It shows our complacency, our lack of passion or inclination to be authentic and really understand our true values. It's consistently depressing, but nevertheless, we carry on.

Think globally, act locally": "Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.