I suggest that the time has come for us to reevaluate
our priorities to determine whether that new shopping mall down the street
is worth the destruction of twenty acres of wetlands, whether that new hotel
downtown will place too high a demand on our drinking water supply; whether
that new high-rise will overburden our sewage systems, whether that new
office park will destroy too many acres of forest.
Gregory Peck
In the wilderness we lay 370,000 miles of roads on
just the Forest Service's 300,000 square miles, more than a mile of road
per square mile of wooded wilderness.
Jane Holtz Kay
The United States is the world's most affluent country
- and the most wasteful. With only 6 percent of the world's people, it uses
more than 50 percent of the world's natural resources, converting them first
into man-made products and then into man-made garbage.
Gary Jennings
The average topsoil cover of this continent was nine
inches deep when the white man came, and those nine inches had taken countless
millions of years to build up. Today, only 350 years later, the average topsoil
is six inches.Gary Jennings
It's been estimated that there are at least 1,400
forest plants and insects with cancer-fighting potential. Tom Hayden
. . . the automobile kills
60,000 people a year in the United States, and supplies the bulk of three
of our five major air pollutants, roughly 92 percent of carbon monoxide,
46 percent of nitrogen oxides, and 63 percent of hydrocarbons.
Buel, Ronald A.
My feeling is we need to save wilderness for its
own sake, for the mysterious and complex knowledge it has within it. Thoreau
was right when he said, "In wilderness is the preservation of the world."
David Brower
. . . we need boundaries
around cities, not around wildness.
David Brower
When some thinker does come forth to provide us with
a rationale for conduct, he will have to consider not only the problems
of man's conduct with his fellow men, but also of man's conduct toward nature.
Marston Bates
In defying nature, in destroying nature, in building
an arrogantly selfish, man-centered, artificial world, I do not see how
man can gain peace or freedom or joy.
Marston Bates
Man the pest, multiplied to the swarming stage,
is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a
field of grain.Edward Abbey
We are obliged . . . to spread the news, painful
and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth
are kindred.Edward Abbey
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