Environmental Consequences Quotes

Man is complex—he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

Progress celebrates victories over nature. Progress makes purses out of human skin. When people were traveling in mail coaches, the world got ahead better than it does now that salesmen fly through the air. What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way? How will the heirs of this age be taught the most basic motions that are necessary to activate the most complicated machines? Nature can rely on progress; it will avenge it for the outrage it has perpetrated on it.

Everybody was going along thinking that it was a day like any other day, and bang, down went the Twin Towers. Changed everything. So you can't really predict the future, but you can say, "Boy, are those glaciers ever melting." You can measure that, and you can say, "When they're all melted there won't be any Athabasca River," and you can say, "What will happen to the oil sands then?" because you need a lot of water to make that oil. "Where's that going to come from?" You can say things like that.

We are, always, reminded of the old saw: What would happen if the Soviet Union took over the Sahara Desert? Answer: Nothing for 50 years. After that there would be a shortage of sand.

Quickly capping 363 oil well fires in a war zone is impossible. The fires would burn out of control until they put themselves out... The resulting soot might well stretch over all of South Asia... It could be carried around the world... [and] the consequences could be dire. Beneath such a pall sunlight would be dimmed, temperatures lowered and droughts more frequent. Spring and summer frosts may be expected... This endangerment of the food supplies... appears to be likely enough that it should affect the war plans.

We must recognize that we're all part of a web of life around the world. Anytime you extinguish a species, the consequences are serious.

Y'know, Nature's unpredictable -- that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.

Everything is deeply affected by the dominant culture. Consumerism is huge in the US. This is by far the wealthiest [nation], but also the biggest consumer in the world. Which means that a lot of things get used, a lot of things get wasted, and a lot of things get churned out in ways that are wasteful.

It is true that, in theory, we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change with an intensive global effort over the next several decades. But given real-world economic and, in particular, political realities, that seems unlikely.

People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother Nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.

My analysis, especially of the computer revolution, always comes back to capitalism. It's that economic system that has led to Western civilization's willingness to enslave ourselves to machines - because some people benefit enormously from it, while the costs are borne by other people and the planet.

I also, as I think most people do, have a healthy instinct that if we upset the balance of nature, we are in all probability going to suffer a reaction. With world growth, and population as it is, this reaction must increase.

What changed in the United States with Hurricane Katrina was a feeling that we have entered a period of consequences.

Hurricane Katrina this past week was certainly the worst episode in what has become an all-too-familiar and tragic cycle, and our nation is now faced with a set of unprecedented challenges.

Nature makes us buy her presents at the price of so many sufferings that it is doubtful whether she deserves most the name of parent or stepmother.

Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them.

The bottom line is that weather events not only threaten private property and family budgets, but they also can decimate public resources and government coffers.

Places change over time with or without oil spills, but humans are responsible for the Deepwater Horizon gusher - and humans, as well as the corals, fish and other creatures, are suffering the consequences.

Injecting CO2 into an underground reservoir would certainly change the local environment and thus affect the organisms that live there. Some will thrive, and others will suffer. While we should minimize such impacts, they cannot be avoided completely. The same happens when one plows a field, builds a house or a road, or waters a lawn.

All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated.

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

All I'm saying is that there is a price to be paid at the sharp end.. environmentally and everywhere else.. for the food that is produced in a particular way.

We discover too late that we have turned a blind eye to the extinction of a species that is essential to the balance of life in a particular context. Or we discover too late that the importation of a foreign life-form, animal or vegetable, has upset local ecosystems, damaging soil or neighbouring life-forms. We discover that we have come near the end of supplies-of fossil-fuels for example -on which we have built immense structures of routine expectation.

Tools can rule men sooner than they expect; the plow makes man the lord of the garden but also the refugee from the dust bowl.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.