342 Quotes About Environmentalism

Follow the high tide mark to see a line of trash and fireworks debris.

There is a reason why trash bags aren't made of transparent plastic.

The planet, saved for another day, stokes upits slow-burning gases and toxic dust, gold rift and scarletgash that take our breath away; a world at its interminableshow of holy dying. And we go with it, the oldgatherer and hunter. To its gaudy-day, though the contributionis small, adding our handsel of warm clay.

We conceived of the planet as female, an all-giving Mother Nature, just as we conceived of the female body, infinitely alterable by and for man; we serve both ourselves and our hopes for the planet by insisting on a new female reality on which to base a new metaphor for the earth: the female body with its own organic integrity that must be respected.

She believed that the arrogance of humankind created a deadly irony: in their determination to control nature, human beings posed a growing threat to all life on earth, including their own.

Government entomologists and chemical company publicists freely employed metaphors that compared insects and Communists. At Columbia University in 1946, former British prime minister Winston Churchill suggested that Communists should study termites in order to see what their future had in store. Unintentionally clarifying the threatening metaphor, the president of the American Economic Entomologists entitled his 1947 speech “Totalitarian Insects.

I had married an environmentalist and didn’t know it. I knew without having to look that there was no tree hugging indemnity clause even in the fine print of our marriage certificate. But we’d been manacled together in the Catholic Church. I wondered if I could get some leverage with the religious institution if I pinned my wife with the label of nature-worshipping Wiccan or possibly even Druid.

At least Ozymandias had a statue erected in his name. If I were to have died at that moment, the only thing I had managed to erect in my honor was a shrine to China’s manufacturing capabilities.

If owning frivolous articles of excess were indeed the trappings of malevolence, my home was ready to play host to the Axis powers.