"In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy." — John C. Sawhill
"The creature at your feet dismissed as a bug or a weed is a creation in and of itself. It has a name, a million-year history, and a place in the world. Its genome adapts it to a special niche in an ecosystem. The ethical value substantiated by close examination of its biology is that the life forms around us are too old, too complex, and potentially too useful to be carelessly discarded." — Edward Wilson The Future of Life
"Public lands instruct in the value of respecting differences. We may all be endowed with a love of nature, but that passion takes many forms. Public lands must accommodate multiple uses because there are multiple publics whose wishes point in all directions. … Such differences don’t have to fester into divisions. The duck hunter and the birdwatcher may have their own ideas about the highest value of a wetland. Yet both know that without public protection, there might not be a wetland at all…. America’s public lands teach the etiquette of sharing. They instruct is in the manners of coexistence, cooperation, and consideration toward each other. … Such humility can remind us that even though we may find the culture and politics of others to be incomprehensible, their desire to find happiness in the natural world is much the same as our own." — Jason Mark Sierra Magazine, July/August 2020 Issue, "In Public Lands is the Preservation of the Republic"
"As we entered California, it looked exactly like Oregon—another reminder of the arbitrariness of most human boundaries." — Jedidiah Jenkins To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret
"In many parts of experimental science unexpected discoveries are made in a workshop. The book of nature, whose pages are open to all, is read but by a few." — James D. Forbes Travels Through the Alps
"So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate." — Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
"Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war." — Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
"[Power, not just energy.] It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power." — Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders." — Edward Abbey
"There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction." — John F. Kennedy
"We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." — Albert Einstein
"For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it." — Jacques-Yves Cousteau
"How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn’t listen." — Victor Hugo
"To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another." — John Burroughs
"'There is no such thing as sustainability. The best we can do is cause the least amount of harm.' Instead of 'sustainable,' he prefers the term 'responsible,' which, he argues, starts with companies treating nature not as a resource to be exploited but as a unique, life-giving entity on which we all—not least business—depend." — Yvon Chouinard The Guardian, "Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard: Denying Climate Change is Evil"
"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
"We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness." — Edward Abbey
"If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war…Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of 'facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy." — Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451
"The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending." — Naomi Kline This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
"The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want. … Nostalgia for an earlier ignorance is not the domain of this discussion." — Barbara Kingsolver Small Wonder
