Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians.
Interpretation
The quote compares modern farming and fishing practices to primal hunting and barbarism, suggesting that they are destructive and unsustainable.
Jacques Yves Cousteau highlights the negative impact of modern agricultural and fishing techniques on the environment, equating them to the primitive ways of hunting and barbarity. This quote reflects a critical view on how humanity has lost its respect for nature, emphasizing the urgent need for sustainable practices that honor the ecosystems rather than degrade them.
In practice
During a speech on climate change, one might use this quote to highlight the urgent need for sustainable agricultural practices.
We must alert and organise the world's people to pressure world leaders to take specific steps to solve the two root causes of our environmental crises - exploding population growth and wasteful consumption of irreplaceable resources. Overconsumption and overpopulation underlie every environmental problem we face today.
No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.
It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.
The impossible missions are the only ones which succeed.
The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before, the old phrase has a literal meaning: we are all in the same boat.
The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish.
Possibly everyone will travel by air in another fifty years. I'm not sure I like the idea of millions of planes flying around overhead. I love the sky's unbroken solitude. I don't like to think of it cluttered up by aircraft, as roads are cluttered up by cars. I feel like the western pioneer when he saw barbed-wire fence lines encroaching on his open plains. The success of his venture brought the end of the life he loved.
If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.
We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.
Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath? Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are nothing, forever?
On a day when the wind is perfect, the sail just needs to open and the world is full of beauty. Today is such a day.
The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.
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