James Fenimore Cooper Quotes

Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.

When we build an attractive home, we raze land on which animals have already built their homes. They have nowhere to go.

How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?

You've got to spread out as far as you can, cut down a whole forest, irrigate a whole desert, just to make sure that you won't accidentally stumble upon a place that's still in its natural state.

Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are termite hills left but no bush?

If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.

There probably were floods when our land was newly settled but before we cut our trees so recklessly they were not so serious. If we go to the headwaters of our rivers and we will find the cause and the results which follow in the wake of man's destructive ignorance.

A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited.

Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race or people, barbaric or civilized

It is easiest to lose your way in the forest after it is cut.

They're still building and testing / But what can we do / Condemning the seas and the land and the trees to a tomb

I am the Lorax! I speak for the trees, Which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please; But I also speak for the brown Barbaloots, Who frolicked and played in their Barbaloot suits, Happily eating Truffula fruits. Now, since you've chopped the trees to the ground There's not enough Truffula fruit to go 'round! And my poor Barbaloots are all feeling the crummies Because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies.

One thing leads to the other. Deforestation leads to climate change, which leads to ecosystem losses, which negatively impacts our livelihoods - it's a vicious cycle.

Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth: erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption.

"Clear-cutting" was the word for what the Rusties had done to the old forests: felling every tree, killing every living thing, turning entire countries into grazing land. Whole rain forests had been consumed, reduced from millions of interlocking species to a bunch of cows eating grass, a vast web of life traded for cheap hamburgers. "Look, we're not clear-cutting. All we're doing is pulling out the garbage that the Rusties left behind,” David said. "It just takes a little surgery to do it."

Resource extraction impacts a global environment that is increasingly at severe risk.

I've killed enough of the world's trees.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.

The civilized people of today look back with horror at their medieval ancestors who wantonly destroyed great works of art or sat slothfully by while they destroyed. We have passed this stage.... Here in the U.S. we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy our forests and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals - not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at best it looks as if our people were awakening.

It is progress when a centuries-old oak is cut down to give space for a road sign.

The body is like the earth ... as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, overmined, and shorn of its power as any landscape.

If you've ever come across a tree that you've lived with for many years and then one day it's blown over, there's incredible shock and violence about that.

When you look at the sheer volume of paper usage in the U.S. alone, it's truly frightening: paper towels, toilet paper, napkins, writing paper. Our consumption of trees is endless.

He who cuts down woods beyond a certain limit exterminates birds.