Paul Hawken Quotes

You cannot put a contaminant in the ground and just think that Mother Nature whips it up and runs it off somewhere else and we never see it again.

In some cases, it's not just about cleaning up the factories. It's about cleaning up the nearby rivers and lakes that have been tainted with heavy metals.

Americans trash the planet not because we're evil, but because the industrial systems we've devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works.

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

When I was 7 years old, I announced that I was going to write a book about pollution. I didn't get around to it until I was 29, but I always recognized that pollution was a theft. That it was a way of stealing something from the public - the common earth.

My father gave me this poster from National Geographic back in the very early 70s, so I was a young teenager. It showed how man polluted his world. And the issues that they talked about, whether it was water pollution, air, or terrestrial... The issues that they talk about on this poster are still very much present today.

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.

It feels like an easy sum to gauge the balance between forests and, say, the proliferating free newspapers that litter our public transport. This noxious combination of words and paper represents a clear-cut crime against the biosphere.

Everybody knows that the industrialized nations are the worst offenders.

Wild animals are just as confused as people are now. You've got toxins in the water, oil, sewage, all sorts of things.

The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.

By polluting clear water with slime you will never find good drinking water.

I simply can't believe nice communities release effluents.

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

When man decides he can control nature, he's in deep trouble.

The things that drive me crazy are coming from this place of people suffering because of people polluting into rivers or whatever. It's not simply just about systems; it's an emotional reaction to seeing animals or people suffering.

Pollution knows no boundaries; it moves across borders.

Environmental crimes often and in death and disease

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.

I have always seen pollution as theft.

There's so much out in the world that is not good for the environment.

When you start traveling and thinking from a global perspective, you realize how small the planet is and how predatory we are to its ecology.

Unfortunately, there are some ecological phenomenological chemicals within consumerism.

The planet is being polluted with many forms of wastes.

We're talking about a chemical that's out there. Not just on one farm in West Virginia, not even just in the public water of an entire community there, but it's now in water all over the country, all over the planet, in the blood of virtually every living thing.