Environmental Disaster Quotes

The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our very eyes. It's been the size of the continental United States for the last 3 million years and now 40 percent is gone and the rest of it is going.

Humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.

Genetic pollution is considerably more dangerous than oil spills. You can’t just go out there and put a boom around it and put it back in.

Climate change that is occurring right now is causing so much suffering all around the world. Whether it's adding 30 million people to the "at risk of starvation" list in 2008, whether it's the floods in Pakistan, or entire cultures at risk of disappearing, or desertification in Africa - all these things that are currently being caused by climate change. I think it's something that a lot of people want to figure out: how to make the shift, how to help. It seems like such an overwhelming problem.

From wherever the emissions come, they have the same effect: They trap much more heat from the sun, melt the ice, raise the sea level, cause stronger storms, floods, drought, bigger fires, generate millions of climate refugees, destabilize political systems, threaten the growing of food crops and cause a number of other catastrophic consequences which, taken together, threaten the basis for the future of human civilization on the Earth.

It'll all end in tears and oil.

We've seen too often what happens when wealthy and powerful industries gain excessive influence over the agencies that regulate them. The capture of the Minerals Management Service at the Department of Interior contributed to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Disasters around the world are twice as big as they ever were, and ice is melting where it's not supposed to melt, and everything's changing - the world is changing - and it's all because of global warming, I think.

If we wipe out the fish, the oceans are going to die. If the oceans die, we die. We can't live on this planet with a dead ocean.

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

Within hours of the impact, most of Mexico and the United States must have been reduced to a desolate wasteland of the most appalling, agonizing destruction. Where only the day before there had been fertile landscapes, full of animals and plants of all kinds, now there was a vast, smoldering netherworld, mercifully hidden from view by black clouds of roiling smoke.

There are two problems for our species' survival - nuclear war and environmental catastrophe - and we're hurtling towards them. Knowingly.

BP wants Twitter to shut down a fake BP account that is mocking the oil company. In response, Twitter wants BP to shut down the oil leak that's ruining the ocean.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

The most powerful country in the world is on its way back to the Stone Age. They say, "We were elected by the gods to govern the planet." But the truth is that what counts is getting hold of the last oil reserves. Instead of finding alternative energy sources, we try to subjugate entire regions of the world. People do not understand that by doing this, the country is going to absolute ruin.

There is no 'need' for us to eat meat, dairy or eggs. Indeed, these foods are increasingly linked to various human diseases and animal agriculture is an environmental disaster for the planet.

The oncoming trouble I speak of is climate change. It's going to affect all of you in the same way the Second World War consumed people of my parent's generation.

Have you been following the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Or as we call it now, the Dead Sea.

Saving Greenland is both a metaphor and a precondition for saving civilization. If its ice sheet melts, sea levels will rise 23 feet. Hundreds of coastal cities will be abandoned. The rice growing river deltas of Asia will be under water. There will be hundreds of millions of rising-sea refuges. The word that comes to mind is chaos. If we cannot mobilize to save the Greenland ice sheet; we probably cannot save civilization as we know it.

Facts have proved that prosperity at the expense of the environment is only delaying disaster. We cannot passively protect our environment by simply stopping economic development.

Belarus is a closed, authoritarian system, and the theme of Chernobyl is also a closed topic.

The stuff that's going on is just so over-the-top, with the banking crisis and destroying the Gulf of Mexico, and the outrage hasn't quite caught up with the people yet. But when it does, I think you're going to see really virulent anti-authoritarian kind of comedy coming out.

We know little of the consequences of the geoengineering process, such as spraying particles into the atmosphere that shade the planet from the sun's rays and could decrease its temperature. But this process is how dinosaurs disappeared from the Earth about 60 million years ago, by particles spewed by a volcano or a giant meteorite impact, and our species could follow suit.

Melting of the huge Antarctic glaciers, proceeding more rapidly than anticipated, threatens a rise in sea level that will drive tens of millions from the low-lying plains of Bangladesh alone, with disastrous consequences elsewhere.

The prairies were dust. Day after day, summer after summer, the scorching winds blew the dust and the sun was brassy in a yellow sky. Crop after crop failed. Again and again the barren land must be mortgaged for taxes and food and next year's seed. The agony of hope ended when there was not harvest and no more credit, no money to pay interest and taxes; the banker took the land. Then the bank failed.