Thich Nhat Hanh Quotes

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.

Growing up I had a real disconnect with the planet.

People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother Nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.

I want to get people to connect to the outdoors.

I have no enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will not instantly destroy.

Man's heart away from nature becomes hard.

The beliefs I was raised with - to respect animals and to be aware of nature, to understand that we share this planet with other creatures - have had a huge impact on me.

The responses that environmentalists evoke - fear, anxiety, numbness, despair - are not helpful, even if they are understandable. It should be fascinating, even enthralling, to be in the milieu of environmental change.

The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters... and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult.

I make photographs and still make photographs of the natural environment. It's a love because that was part of my life before I was involved in photography.

Mother Nature comes up against reality, and the reality is that the system doesn't work.

Our minds and memories are crowded with the common experience of nature.

In the rush of today's world, and with more than half of us now living in cities, the majority of people are less and less connected with the spectacle of nature.

Nature surrounds us, from parks and backyards to streets and alleyways. Next time you go out for a walk, tread gently and remember that we are both inhabitants and stewards of nature in our neighbourhoods.

I was sort of growing up at a time of really rapidly expanding ecological consciousness. It was a time of reckoning when people were talking about how the Everglades was on life support. I was always trying to reconcile it as a kid.

There isn't a person on Earth who couldn't use a connection with nature.

What I want to do with my filmmaking is help kids experience the truth and wisdom of nature no matter where they are, whether or not they have the opportunity to go to a national park.

I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn't changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament.

In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

First and foremost we are Earthlings.

I'm not unhappy with the idea of appealing to people's self-interest if that's what makes them understand something about the non-human world.

We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

I really think admiration for nature can save us. I mean true admiration, to the point of not letting it be harmed.

I think every pet lover has an appreciation for nature - I've never met an animal lover who didn't have some kind of connection to the natural world.