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Environmental Quotes

• “Let every individual and institution now think and act as a responsible trustee of Earth, seeking choices in ecology, economics and ethics that will provide a sustainable future, eliminate pollution, poverty and violence, awaken the wonder of life and foster peaceful progress in the human adventure."
John McConnell, founder of International Earth Day

• "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."
Dr. Seuss, "The Lorax"

• "Industrialized, chemical-intensive agriculture and our globalized system of distributing food and fiber are literally destroying the earth, driving two billion farmers off the land, and producing a product which is increasingly contaminated. That's why the wave of the future is organic and sustainable, not GMO."
Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association

• "An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics and related drugs produced in this country are used for non therapeutic purposes such as accelerating animal growth and compensating for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions on 'factory farms.' This translates to ... almost eight times the amount given to humans to treat disease."
Union of Concerned Scientists

• "We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth's functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and geocide, the devastation of the earth itself."
Father Thomas Berry

• "A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy."
John Sawhill former president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy

• "Eventually we'll realize that if we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves."
Jonas Salk

• "We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service relationship to humanity."
Martin Luther King

• "Humanity, in the desperate attempt to fit 8 billion or more people on the planet and give them a higher standard of living, is at risk of pushing the rest of life off the globe."
E.O. Wilson

• "Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology."
William Thompson

• "We have found the sources of hazardous waste and they are us."
US EPA, from "Everybody's Problem: Hazardous Waste"

• "The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life."
Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring"

• "When the earth is sick and polluted, human health is impossible.... To heal ourselves we must heal our planet, and to heal our planet we must heal ourselves."
Bobby McLeod (Koori activist, aboriginal)

• Only when the last tree has been cut down, Only when the last river has been poisoned, Only when the last fish has been caught, Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.— Cree Indian Prophecy.

• True wisdom consists in not departing from nature and in moulding our conduct according to her laws and model." -Seneca, ancient Roman writer

• "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi.

• Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a songbird will come." - Chinese proverb.

• Your descendants shall gather your fruits." - Virgil

• Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." - Mahatma Gandhi.

• The superior man seeks what is right; the inferior one, what is profitable." Confucius;