Natural Resource Preservation Quotes

We are consuming our forests three times faster than they are being reproduced. Some of the richest timber lands of this continent have already been destroyed, and not replaced, and other vast areas are on the verge of destruction. Yet forests, unlike mines, can be so handled as to yield the best results of use, without exhaustion, just like grain fields.

Water is the most precious, limited natural resource we have in this country...But because water belongs to no one - except the people - special interests, including government polluters, use it as their private sewers.

When you live in a watershed area, in a pristine area, and you could watch this whole place fall apart in front of your eyes, you don't sell your soul for a buck.

The future will belong to the nature-smart-those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.

Conservationists have, I fear, adopted the pedagogical method of the prophets: we mutter darkly about impending doom if people don't mend their ways. The doom is impending, all right; no one can be an ecologist, even an amateur one, without seeing it. But do people mend their ways for fear of calamity? I doubt it. They are more likely to do it out of pure curiosity and interest.

Once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price

Contrary to popular belief, we do not face a choice between economy and ecology, It is often said that protecting the environment would constrain or even undermine economic growth. In fact, the opposite is true: unless we protect resources and the earth's natural capital, we shall not be able to sustain economic growth.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

Opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling is bad public policy that has no place in the budget process,. The Budget Committee needs to leave drilling in the Arctic Refuge behind and focus on crafting this year's budget package.

Can we afford clean water? Can we afford rivers and lakes and streams and oceans which continue to make possible life on this planet? Can we afford life itself? Those questions were never asked as we destroyed the waters of our nation, and they deserve no answers as we finally move to restore and renew them. These questions answer themselves.

If we are not sensible about this, in our ideas of wealth creation we may completely destroy the planet - which we are already doing in many ways.

The best friend on earth of man is the tree: When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources of the earth.

The key to any successful plan is buy-in from the public, and what this process has demonstrated is the importance of including citizens in formulating a consensus plan that preserves our beautiful refuge.

Leave the woodpile higher than you found it.

Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.

Around the world, we see the results of exploitation which destroys much without taking future generations into account. Protecting the world's forests; stemming desertification and erosion; avoiding the spread of toxic substances harmful to man, animals and plants; protecting the atmosphere; all these can be accomplished only through active and wise cooperation, without borders or political power plays.

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke [of the axe] he is writing his signature on the face of his land.

I'm proud of having been one of the first to recognize that states and the federal government have a duty to protect our natural resources from the damaging effects of pollution that can accompany industrial development.

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.

To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals. And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.

The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal battle between right and wrong.

New technology lets you grow the resource pie, which is the only way you can get out between that pincer of rising consumption (as we end poverty) and environmental and natural resource depletion.

In the time that I have been acquainted with this region I have become increasingly aware of it as a testament of water, the origin and guide of its contours and gradients and of all the lives - the plants and small creatures, and the culture - that evolved here. That was always here to be seen, of course, and the recognition has forced itself, in one form or other, upon people in every part of the world who have been directly involved with the growing of living things. The gardener who ignores it is soon left with no garden.

I want to make it clear,if there is ever a conflict [between environmental quality and economic growth], I will go for beauty, clean air, water, and landscape.