Saturday, April 23, 2005
Back in 1990, I commemorated Earth Day by quoting some thoughtful writers who shared a love of the planet and humanity. Here's another edition. May these words inspire thought, promote discussion and provoke action.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtfully committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead
"Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best." -- William Blake
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues -- self-restraint." -- Edwin Way Teale
"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death." -- Rachel Carson
"To keep every cog and every wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering." -- Aldo Leopold
"What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts soon happens to the man. All things are connected." -- Chief Seattle
"For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish piecemeal." -- Thomas Jefferson
"Without habitat, there is no wildlife. It's that simple." -- Wildlife Habitat Canada
"Only in the last moment of human history has the delusion arisen that people can flourish apart from the rest of the living world." -- E.O. Wilson
"Arresting global population growth should be second in importance only to avoiding nuclear war on humanity's agenda." -- Paul and Anne Ehrlich
"Natural systems are like those hollow Russian dolls, layer nested within layer within layer, always hiding a new riddle beneath the last one." -- Scott Weidensaul
"We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species, which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy." -- Wallace Stegner
"If we go on as we are, we will destroy in the next century everything that the poets have been singing about for the past 2,000 years." -- Fred Bodsworth
"I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. -- Theodore Roosevelt
"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment." -- Ansel Adams
"Throughout our history, our greatest resource has been our land -- forests and plains, mountains and marshlands, rivers and lakes. Our land has sustained us. It has given us a love of freedom, a sense of security, and courage to test the unknown." -- Richard Nixon
"The ecologization of politics requires us to acknowledge the priority of human values and makes ecology part of education at an early age, molding a new, modern approach to nature and, at the same time, giving back to man a sense of being part of nature. No moral improvement of society is possible without that." -- Mikhail Gorbachev
"It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature." -- Christopher Morley
"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children." -- John James Audubon
"God bless America. Let's save some of it." -- Edward Abbey
"The purpose of conservation: the greatest good to the greatest number of people for the longest time." -- Gifford Pinchot
"We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them." -- Albert Einstein
"Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle." -- Pope John Paul II
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