Quotes on Pollution

Man is a complex being: he makes deserts bloom - and lakes die.

Acknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world - water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution - if we tackle them with courage and foresight.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

Economics has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.

America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an over-all environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight.

Global warming pollution, indeed all pollution, is now described by economists as an “externality.” This absurd label means, in essence: we don’t to keep track of this stuff so let’s pretend it doesn’t exist.

I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.

We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life. To say we do not care is to say in the most literal sense that "we choose death."

It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today.

...only the unscrupulous or shortsighted can defend pollution and degradation of the countryside.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.... Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.

Who gets the risks? The risks are given to the consumer, the unsuspecting consumer and the poor work force. And who gets the benefits? The benefits are only for the corporations, for the money makers.

Doing all we can to combat climate change comes with numerous benefits, from reducing pollution and associated health care costs to strengthening and diversifying the economy by shifting to renewable energy, among other measures.

While I am a great believer in the free enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment.

You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in D.C. in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We're not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history.

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, _x000D_ For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. _x000D_ America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, _x000D_ And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

When I was 7 years old, I announced that I was going to write a book about pollution. I didn't get around to it until I was 29, but I always recognized that pollution was a theft. That it was a way of stealing something from the public - the common earth.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

Pollution is everywhere, in that ancient Greek sense of miasma: guilt experienced as abject body fluid, moral pollution defining what kinds of beings count in social space.

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.