Environmental Contamination Quotes

The dose makes the poison.

Along with the possibility of extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man's total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm-substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.

The asbestos problem impacts everyone.

Let me get a sip of water here... you figure this stuff is safe to drink? Actually, I don't care, I drink it anyway. You know why? Because I'm an American and I expect a little cancer in my food and water. I'm a loyal American and I'm not happy unless I let government and industry poison me a little bit every day.

The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures.

We are introducing compounds into the environment that did not exist only a few decades ago.

We pretended there was no problem with Agent Orange after Vietnam and later the Pentagon recanted, after untold suffering by veterans.

Arsenic sticks around and today it's easily found after death if somebody thinks of looking for it, because the problem with arsenic, it isn't looked for in the common tests for drugs.

Sour gas is one of the most dangerous, toxic substances known to man.

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. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world-the very nature of its life.

People don't like getting dirty or living in an environment that's been contaminated and is covered in hazardous waste.

We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be indifferent to the same effect in chemicals we disseminate widely in our environment?

The Environmental Protection Agency rarely follows up prosecuting coal companies and their fellow polluters, even when the evidence is clear-cut that they are dumping and poisoning entire towns near their projects, and the state regulators are even worse.

Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.

How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?

Chemicals are not currently tested for their endocrine disruption potential before they are approved for use and enter our environment, and there are endocrine disruptors in a vast array of products we come into contact with every day, including organochlorine pesticides, plastics, fuels, and other industrial chemicals.

Nobody wants to open a business near a Superfund site and risk being sued.

We (the DOE) are poisoning our people in the name of national security.

The danger of dioxins in our environment, our food chain, and our bodies is difficult to illustrate, since they are not visible to the naked eye. My time in Vietnam allowed me to see the result of large quantities of them and therefore understand better the insidiousness of the smaller quantities that have found their way into our lives and bodies.

No element gets people telling crazy stories like mercury does. People have told me tales about pharmacists waxing floors with mercury, mothers rubbing it into babies' skin to kill germs, and 10-year-olds coating dimes in it to make them shine, then blithely carrying them around in their pockets.

Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.

Ten to 15 of my childhood friends from Minsk died of cancer. Chernobyl kills.

Water is an issue, and, clearly, what's happening with the filth in our environment and the levels of carbon monoxide in our atmosphere are the really scary issues right now, the very troubling ones.

Our nations are run by absolute worthless scum, our streets are taken over by sub-humans, the food we eat and the water we drink contains poison, our cultures are systematically replaced by "anti-culture", history is a big lie, et cetera et cetera. Of all the options I chose to start this blog, to spread dissent, to tell others - yes Burzum fans too - that there is an alternative to all of this.

I always say I stumbled on the information about the poison in Hinkley's drinking water because I was sort of stumbling about in my life at that time generally, as a single mother.