Environmental Perspective Quotes

What are men to rocks and mountains?

I grew up in northern Minnesota on 40 acres of wooded land 20 miles from the nearest town, and so the wilderness was home. It was not an unsafe place. I had that advantage. But there are so many representations of the wilderness being dangerous. You know, depictions of wild animals attacking people. It's like, "No, we kill those animals in far greater numbers than they kill us."

I tell my environmental friends that they have won. Every issue we look at from an energy perspective is now also looked at from an environmental perspective.

It is a fascinating and provocative thought that a body of water deserves to be considered as an organism in its own right.

My lens of choice was always the 35 mm. It was more environmental. You can't come in closer with the 35 mm.

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.

So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us. Because the planet doesn't need to be saved. It doesn't care if all the squirrels, elephants, and trees die and there's just a couple of amoebas floating around at the poles.

It's important to recognise that humans are not the measure of all things... The Earth is the measure of all things.

Spring and autumn are inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a cloud.

It's the only way we can get out of being so human-centered: to remain attached to something other than humans.

The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; if a river is one of the veins of the land, not potential irrigation water; if a forest is a sacred grove, not timber; if other species are biological kin, not resources; or if the planet is our mother, not an opportunity -- then we will treat each other with greater respect. Thus is the challenge, to look at the world from a different perspective.

There is a history of thinking about space science from an environmental ethics perspective. And part of what I want to do is turn that back and use that experience to see if it reflects how we think about the Earth.

I wonder if politicians know less about the land, now that they campaign by air.

Landscape to me is a planar thing, just a view. Environment is everything down to the ecosystem. Big difference.

We see that the environment is something to exploit, because we see the environment in terms of minerals for example, or forests, or even raw materials that we produce on our land, or even land itself. We see it in terms of what we can exploit rather than the medium in which all of these activities have to take place.

I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.