We're in a giant car heading towards a brick wall and everyone's arguing over where they're going to sit.
Hydraulic fracturing requires massive amounts of water. Disposing of the toxic wastewater, as well as accidental spills, can contaminate drinking water and harm human health.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Hydraulic fracturing risks water contamination and poses health hazards due to its use of large water volumes and toxic wastewater.
This quote by David Suzuki highlights the environmental and health risks associated with hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking. By emphasizing the massive water requirements for the process, alongside the dangers posed by wastewater disposal and potential spills, it raises awareness about the serious implications for drinking water safety and public health, urging society to consider the broader consequences of such energy extraction methods.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in an environmental awareness campaign to discuss the impacts of fracking.
More from David Suzuki
All quotes βAs parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts we need to start getting out into nature with the young people in our lives. Families play a key role in getting kids outside.
One of the joys of being a grandparent is getting to see the world again through the eyes of a child.
The medical literature tells us that the most effective ways to reduce the risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and many more problems are through healthy diet and exercise. Our bodies have evolved to move, yet we now use the energy in oil instead of muscles to do our work.
Do you know how much land is under ice, rock and snow? Do you know why 90 percent of us live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border? We have this idea we're a vast country. But the reality is that a lot of it, a huge amount, is uninhabitable.
We no longer see the world as a single entity. We've moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.
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You can print money to bail out a bank, but you can't print life to bail out a planet.
Everything we make pollutes. The most responsible thing we can do is to make each product as well as we know how so it lasts as long as possible.
For the record, I am sticking with my claim that the simultaneous degradation of air quality, water quality, water supply, food safety, soil quality, and other environment-related variables is the main challenge to China's continued development.
The features that have made plastic so important in the global market are the same ones that make it such a pervasive pollutant: durability and resistance to degradation.
Will the new environmental leaders fight for eco-equity in this new "green economy" they are birthing?
Government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol from corn will go down in history as the "Iraq War" of environmental solutions: ill-considered, costly, and disastrous.