John D'Agata Quotes

Men are weak now, and yet they transform the Earth's surface. In millions of years, their might will increase to the extent that they will change the surface of the Earth, its oceans, the atmosphere, and themselves.

I don’t want the West to be used as the place where we store the nation’s nuclear waste.

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?

Environmental degradation has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.

What I'm interested in is the conversations going on about the Anthropocene and what it means to view ourselves as a part of Earth's geological history.

For more than 30 years, the state of Nevada and local communities have rejected the Yucca Mountain project. In fact, the state has filed over 200 contentions against the Department of Energy's license application, challenging the adequacy of the department's environmental impact assessments.

A volcano may be considered as a cannon of immense size.

I have flown twice over Mount St. Helens out on our West Coast. I'm not a scientist and I don't know the figures, but I have a suspicion that that one little mountain has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere of the world than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind that people are so concerned about.

However, there are a couple of volcanoes very close nearby, like Vesuvius in Italy right next to Naples.

I don't think you can escape the environment we live in now.

For decades we have been living lives of abundance, with little regard for our natural resources or global health. But we are now facing hard choices in our energy policy. Future generations - my children and grandchildren, along with yours - will have to live with the decisions we make today. And so it is time for us to make some tough and - hopefully - smart choices regarding our energy use and production before it is too late.

The oceans are pretty unexplored places and the final frontier on our planet; also because they're the source of life. There are dramatic things happening to them at the moment, and they're worth exploring.

What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?

You should know what is taken out of the ecosystem in order to give you a moment's sustenance.

The earth is, like our own skin, fated to carry the scars of ancient wounds.

In contrast [to trees and fish], oil, metals, and coal are not renewable; they don't reproduce, sprout, or have sex to produce baby oil droplets or coal nuggets.

That whole thing has been overstated by environmentalists. First of all, what is it, rocks and snow? C'mon, what is that, you want that? Go to Canada my friend. Believe me, rocks and snow are overrated. I've seen otters - they look better covered in oil.

In Utah alone, ten million acres are open for business. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests.

I think the global warming debate is now pretty much over and people recognize the need associated with providing sources which do not generate the heat that is currently provided by fossil fuels. I concur that climate change is beginning to [have an] effect on our natural resources and that now is the time to take action.

We Americans think we are pretty good! We want to build a house, we cut down some trees. We want to build a fire, we dig a little coal. But when we run out of all these things, then we will find out just how good we really are.

This is not something that happens far away to people that we don't know. Global warming is something that happens to all of us, all at once.

There are some monuments where the land is so widespread, they just encompass as much as possible. And the integral part of the - the precious part, so to speak - I guess all land is precious, but the part that the people uniformly would not want to spoil, will not be despoiled. But there are parts of the monument lands where we can explore without affecting the overall environment.

The wonderful thing is that Clive [Oppenheimer ] insisted on training his camera - his private camera - on me at one point. We were discussing things such as how to avoid certain dangers, while reflecting on a volcano that had threatened to explode 40 years ago.

You better lava me now or lava me not.

History is largely a record of human struggle to wrest the land from nature, because man relies for sustenance on the products of the soil. So direct, is the relationship between soil erosion, the productivity of the land, and the prosperity of people, that the history of mankind, to a considerable degree at least, may be interpreted in terms of the soil and what has happened to it as the result of human use.