I'm truly sorry man's dominion has broken Nature's social union.
The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials.
Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage.
In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.
I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today" and, "We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox
In the 1950s and '60s, America's natural resources were in bad shape. Communities were so polluted that clouds of smog lingered over cities like Los Angeles. Rivers and lakes were filled with chemicals. In my hometown of Boston, the harbor was among the nation's most polluted waterways.
That's what people do when they find a special place that wild and full of life, they trample it to death.
Shame on us if 100 years from now our grandchildren are living on a planet that has been irreparably damaged by Global Warming, and they ask, 'How could those who came before us, who saw this coming, have let this happen?'
It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.
The worst thing that will probably happen-in fact is already well underway-is not energy depletion, economic collapse, conventional war, or the expansion of totalitarian governments. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired in a few generations. The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.
If you don't have the ability or encouragement to use yourself in a physical way, you could become just another talking head. And talking heads run things. That's part of the reason why we're in such a sad state as a planet, because it's all about thinking, and thinking has led to a lot of aggrandizement - taking over [resources] and figuring out how you can steal and leaving people and the planet in an impoverished state.
We don't even know what species are out there, for the most part, particularly when you get down to the microbes and very small invertebrates. They make up the mass of the organisms around us, including the soil we depend on, the soil of cornfields as well as hardwood forests. We haven't taken ecology to the point where we can even make a crude prediction of what's going to happen when we've reduced the living world down to a certain level.
We are turning everything on this planet into food for humans. We'll eat it and, if we can't eat it, we'll kill it and take its place and just move it out of the way.
The carbon emissions from tar shale and tar sands would initiate a continual unfolding of climate disasters over the course of this century. We would be miserable stewards of creation. We would rob our own children and grandchildren.
As long as we relate to the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the fields and the oceans as properties which we can manipulate according to our real or fabricated needs, nature remains opaque, and does not reveal to us its true being.
Restoration ecology is experimental science, a science of love and altruism. In its attempts to reverse the processes of ecosystem degradation it runs exactly counter to the market system, to land speculation, to the whole cultural attitude of regarding the Earth as commodity rather than community. It is a soft-souled science.
My greatest hope is that we transcend the most fearful thing, which is that we are rapidly degrading the ecological systems on this planet that support everything we are doing and all life on it.
Almost all these hotspots around the world, most have been destroyed to the point where there is no wildlife and very little of the natural world left.
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 recent upsurge of public concern over environmental questions reflects a belated recognition that man has been too cavalier in his relations with nature. Unless we arrest the depredations that have been inflicted so carelessly on our natural systems-which exist in an intricate set of balances-we face the prospect of ecological disaster.
Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.
My basic political posture is "what a shame the human race did this to earth." What we have done environmentally, politically, culturally.
Instead, we have found ourselves gasping for air in a sea of corruption, dysfunction, environmental degradation, waste, disenchantment and inequality—and the harder we compete, the more unequal we become.
