The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.
I think humanity is not wise enough to know what genotype or somatype is going to be the most successful or the most fit - simply because we're not fully in control of our environment.
Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery.
I think becoming a scientist is the product of parents who gave me enormous opportunities to master nature.
Ozone is something that we most definitely have to regulate. It's a very important thing to regulate.
Human ingenuity has given centuries to the goal of ensuring that the human body might move around at an even 68 degrees all year.
We can choose to function at a lower level of awareness and simply exist, caring for our possessions, eating, drinking, sleeping and managing in the world as pawns of the elements, or we can soar to new and higher levels of awareness allowing ourselves to transcend our environment and literally create a world of our own - a world of real magic.
The art of natural education consists in ignoring the faults of children nine times out of ten, in avoiding immediate interference, which is usually a mistake, and devoting one's whole vigilance to the control of the environment in which the child is growing up, to watching the education which is allowed to go on by itself.
One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.
Americans are nature-lovers: but they only admit of nature proofed and corrected by man.
The global warming scare has provided a field day for politicians and others who wish to control our lives. After all, only the imagination limits the kind of laws and restrictions that can be written in the name of saving the planet.
The destiny of our land, the air we breathe, the water we drink is not in the mystical hands of an uncontrollable agent, it is in our hands. A future which brings the balancing of our resources-preserving quality with quantity - is a future limited only by the boundaries of our will to get the job done.
The physical life of the scene is determined by whether the set squeezes people together or whether the set has an escape place in it.
Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining.
The Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), which controls the living environment on shuttles and on the International Space Station, doesn't have the luxury of disposal: discharging trash into space has long been judged a bad idea.
The idea that we have the capacity to change or stop the climate, I'm just skeptical.
If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it's going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it's also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways!
The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.
To preserve the human race, it is now necessary to reorganize society. To this end, an Authority must be created with the power to control human population, to redistribute food, to purify air, water, soil, to re-pattern the cities.
I do hate air conditioning and early mornings, but my friends all know this and plan accordingly.
Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment
This (environmental treaty) process has nothing to do with the weather. It has nothing to do with man's impact on the weather. It has everything to do with establishing the socialist international at the heart of the UN and making every nation bow the knee to this new dictatorship, and the climate is merely a fig leaf to cover what they are trying to do.
We don't exactly have the opposite interests to chimpanzees. However, things are not looking up for the chimpanzees, because we control their environment. Our interests are not perfectly aligned with theirs, and it turns out it's not easy to get interests aligned.
The effect of civilization is to impose human law upon environment until it becomes machine-like in its regularity. The objectionable is eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen. One is not even made wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about gruesome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a well-oiled groove to the family vault, where the hinges are kept from rusting and the dust from the air is swept continually away.
