Ecosystem Destruction Quotes

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed,-chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests. During a man's life only saplings can be grown, in the place of the old trees-tens of centuries old-that have been destroyed.

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.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

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.

We’re turning everything on the planet into food for humans so we’re cutting down the rainforests, displacing all of the animals, and we’re doing all this to feed humans... ... Imagine if there were only 2 billion people polluting? We’re already overpopulated. I feel we’ve become a parasite on this planet. If this population keeps growing, we’ll just keep devouring the planet, and I don’t think it’s going to stand for that very long.

As species are exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species.

The axe and saw are insanely busy, chips are flying thick as snowflakes, and every summer thousands of acres of priceless forests, with their underbrush, soil, springs, climate, scenery, and religion, are vanishing away in clouds of smoke, while, except in the national parks, not one forest guard is employed.

It is a fact that the entire Kentucky River system, which the central part of the state complacently depends upon for its future water, is deteriorating rapidly because of strip mining, because of bad farming, because of industrial and agricultural pollutants, because of urban sewage. It is deteriorating, that is to say, because almost nobody cares, or cares to know, where water comes from, so long as it keeps coming.

They are not valuable wetlands. They are degraded industrial wastelands.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.

I could cut my leg of; I could cut my arm off. I could gouge my eye out - I'd still probably survive, but not very well, and that's what we're doing to the ocean. It's the life support system of this planet. We've been dumping in it, we've been polluting it, we've been destroying it for decades, and we're essentially maiming ourselves.

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.

We are living in a science-fiction nightmare where children are gasping for breath on bad-air days because somebody gave money to a politician. And my children and the kids of millions of other Americans can no longer go fishing and eat their catch because somebody gave money to a politician.

The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

Bottom trawling is a ghastly process that brings untold damage to sea beds that support ocean life. It's akin to using a bulldozer to catch a butterfly, destroying a whole ecosystem for the sake of a few pounds of protein. We wouldn't do this on land, so why do it in the oceans?

People thought they could explain and conquer nature-yet the outcome is that they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.

Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life.

We are letting the extractive energy industries turn the world inside out.

They paved paradise and put up a parkin lot With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swingin' hot spot Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you got till it's gone

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

We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.

No time to grieve for roses when the forests are burning.

It is a thorough process, this war with the wilderness - breaking nature, taming the soil. feeding it on oats. The civilized man regards the pine tree as his enemy. He will fell it and let in the light, grub it up and raise wheat or rye there. It is no better than a fungus to him.

We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go.

We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?