George Burns Quotes

Environmental degradation and pollution constrain economic growth, contribute to large-scale migration, harm public health, and engender social unrest.

Imagine if Congress always put the interests of polluters ahead of the health of our families. Our rivers and lakes would be choked with sewage. Acid rain would pour down from smog-filled skies. Hundreds of thousands more of our neighbors, friends, and loved ones would be victims of cancer, heart disease, and asthma.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

We humans are the greatest of earth's parasites.

Pollution is a serious one. Water pollution, air pollution, and then solid hazardous waste pollution. And then beyond that, we also have the resources issue. Not just water resources but other natural resources, the mining resources being consumed, and the destruction of our ecosystem.

Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.

Relative to most of the energy and material flows on Earth, the machinations of humankind are puny. The planet's powers are much, much bigger than our own. But in a few sensitive places, we're making an impact on a planetary scale, and that impact is not a good one.

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

The coal industry is a huge industry when we're talking about polluting the environment, our air and our waterways.

We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we've smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don't think it's our privilege to behave this way.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.

Around the world today we're seeing an incredible transformation, from what I would call a biocidal species, one that - whether we intentionally or unintentionally - have designed our systems to kill life, a lot of the time.

What I have found most surprising is the amount of damage we have done to environment in the course of my lifetime - not even five and a half decades.

Man is a complex animal; he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore,, Currents of debris upon my breast.

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

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans.

The whole of nature cries out at our mistreatment of her. If the planet were a patient, we would have treated her long ago.

The planet is being polluted with many forms of wastes.

The Delaware Estuary has sustained a human population for thousands of years, but by the end of the 19th Century, increased population and industrialization had transformed much of the upper Estuary watershed.