Desertification Quotes

If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand.

I am sympathetic to developing countries’ concerns: because of our emissions it’s their crops that will disappear; because of our inaction, it’s their fields that turn to desert...

One tragic example of the loss of forests and then water is found in Ethiopia. The amount of its forested land has decreased from 40 to 1 percent in the last four decades. Concurrently, the amount of rainfall has declined to the point where the country is rapidly becoming a wasteland.

Climate change that is occurring right now is causing so much suffering all around the world. Whether it's adding 30 million people to the "at risk of starvation" list in 2008, whether it's the floods in Pakistan, or entire cultures at risk of disappearing, or desertification in Africa - all these things that are currently being caused by climate change. I think it's something that a lot of people want to figure out: how to make the shift, how to help. It seems like such an overwhelming problem.

The plains are almost wholly uninhabitable by people depending upon agriculture.

Human civilization has been changing the Earth's environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.

Soil erosion is a national menace.

The outside world thinks that this country consists of a man and a desert.

One of the great things about Lanai is that the weather is always fabulous. Always 82 degrees and sunny. The problem is that, like California now, Lanai needs more water.

You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer. You don't know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream. You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can't bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert. If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

The tropical rain forests are a telling example. Once cut down, they rarely recover. Rainfall drops, deserts spread, the climate warms.

Erosion, desertification, and pollution have become our lot. It is a weird form of suicide, for we are bleeding our planet to death.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

Gradually I came to realize that the process of saving the desert of the human heart and revegetating the actual desert is actually the same thing.

The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.

Phoenix is an interesting example. Drive around and see the golf courses everywhere, and you see people's big green lawns. And you live in a desert! I've always remarked about the capacity of human beings to look at somewhere and move there because of its uniqueness and its beauty and then change it.

The deserts of the Middle East are in need of water, not bombers.

Climate change is having a dramatic effect on the ground.

If you cut down the forest, you know what happens: The whole of Asia turns into a desert. Without water, you're talking civil unrest, war, mud slides - the whole bloody lot.

There would be no call for ecological campaigning had nature not been exploited and abused. We experience the ground now bringing forth thistles as soil erosion devastates formerly arable land and deserts overtake fertile farms. Rivers and the atmosphere are polluted thoughtlessly and we are fearful of the consequences of a depleted ozone layer and the devastation of the greenhouse effect. We are not quite at home in our world, and somewhere in each of us there is a nostalgia for a paradise that has been lost.

With wrong farming methods, we turn fertile land into desert. Unless we go back to organic farming and save the soil, there is no future.

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*.

Hollywood's like Egypt, full of crumbled pyramids. It'll never come back. It'll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.

The danger of collective catastrophe … is so great as to be in part a certainty.

Though Africa is not responsible for emitting greenhouse gases, it is suffering the consequences of climate change.