We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.
Interpretation
While we often assume that air and water are free resources, their cleanliness comes at a cost due to pollution control efforts. Neglecting environmental care has led to a pressing debt to nature.
Richard M. Nixon's quote emphasizes the misconception that natural resources like air and water are free. In reality, maintaining their cleanliness requires significant investment in pollution control measures. Our past indifference to environmental issues has compounded the problem, creating an ecological debt that society is now obligated to address. This serves as a reminder of the responsibility we bear in preserving our environment for future generations.
In practice
During a discussion on environmental policies, one might quote Nixon to emphasize the importance of investing in pollution control.
The destiny of our land, the air we breathe, the water we drink is not in the mystical hands of an uncontrollable agent, it is in our hands. A future which brings the balancing of our resources-preserving quality with quantity - is a future limited only by the boundaries of our will to get the job done.
The recent upsurge of public concern over environmental questions reflects a belated recognition that man has been too cavalier in his relations with nature. Unless we arrest the depredations that have been inflicted so carelessly on our natural systems-which exist in an intricate set of balances-we face the prospect of ecological disaster.
The ability to be cool, confident, and decisive in crisis is not an inherited characteristic but is the direct result of how well the individual has prepared himself for the battle.
If you take no risks, you will suffer no defeats. But if you take no risks, you win no victories.
If the President does it, it can't be illegal.
We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
I was at Earth Summit in Rio 20 years ago... I was only 12 years old. And when I was speaking to the U.N. I was fighting for my future.
To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.
When the ancestors of the cheetah first began pursuing the ancestors of the gazelle, neither of them could run as fast as they can today.
Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.
Nature is man's inorganic body -- that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature -- i.e., nature is his body -- and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it is he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.
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