Landscape Destruction Quotes

It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did.

For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.

I've always liked trees. And then, growing up, I took an interest in ecology, hedges being destroyed, the landscape being turned into prairies.

The body is like the earth ... as vulnerable to overbuilding, being carved into parcels, cut off, overmined, and shorn of its power as any landscape.

Windmills are going to be the death of Scotland and even England if they don't do something about them. They are ruining the countryside.

The whole Ireland was taken over by greed and materialism. It was extraordinary. The price of every house had skyrocketed. If you were a small farmer and you had two fields outside, if you built 17 bungalows on them all, you become a millionaire, that kind of thing. It was extraordinary to see how rapidly that kind of ethic takes over a whole culture, but that's what's happened to us since the year 1998, about. It's completely extraordinary how little regard the culture had for the landscape. The country is now full of these half-built industrial parks and hotels.

Russian forests crash down under the axe, billions of trees are dying, the habitations of animals and birds are laid waste, rivers grow shallow and dry up, marvelous landscapes are disappearing forever.... Man is endowed with creativity in order to multiply that which has been given him; he has not created, but destroyed. There are fewer and fewer forests, rivers are drying up, wildlife has become extinct, the climate is ruined, and the earth is becoming ever poorer and uglier.

New roads carve up the countryside, dispelling peace, creating a penumbra of noise, pollution and ugliness. Their effects spread for many miles.

I don't like litter and blight.

The story of mountaintop mining - why it happens, and what its consequences are - is still new to most Americans. They have no idea that their country's physical legacy - the purple mountain majesties that are America - is being destroyed at the rate of several ridgetops a week, by three million pounds of explosives every day.

The time has come when we cannot be so careless. Unless we do better, we may suffer through a stark emergency of the environment. We may create a hostile world: a world to bruise ourselves against; a world of sprawling cities, unplanned or badly planned; a world whose water is full of sludge, whose winds are full of soot; a world whose landscape has been totally neglected, stripped, marred, and wasted. All of this need not happen if we choose well, and particularly if we plan well and if we act well.

(The processes are) doubly ruinous: they impoverish the earth by hastily removing, for the benefit of a few generations, the common resources which, once expended and dissipated, can never be restored; and second, in its technique, its habits, its processes, the paleotechnic period is equally inimical to the earth considered as a human habitat, by its destruction of the beauty of the landscape, its ruining of streams, its pollution of drinking water, its filling the air with a finely divided carboniferous deposit, which chokes both life and vegetation.

As Dutch elm disease spread across Britain in the 1970s, the country fell into mourning. When the sentinel trees that framed our horizons were felled, their loss was a constant topic of sad and angry conversation.

With the mining sites, I found a subject matter that carried forth my fascination with the undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty and its environmental politics.

What I loathe is the multi-national conglomerates who must take responsibility for the degradation and pollution of so much of our landscape with their factory farming and greed.

That statement [ Stephen Ambrose:'You, Sam, have the hardest job, which is, pretend like nothing has happened in the last 200 years.'] woke me up to the fact that the landscape that Lewis and Clark came across was greater than the Serengeti. And it's gone.

Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.

The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish.