Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed.
The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.
The truth is: the natural world is changing. And we are totally dependent on that world. It provides our food, water and air. It is the most precious thing we have and we need to defend it.
Obviously, the answer to oil spills is to paper-train the tankers.
It cannot suffice to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. It is necessary to change and improve our understanding of the true purpose of what we are and what we do in the world. Only such a new understanding will allow us to develop new models of behavior, new scales of values and goals, and thereby invest the global regulations, treaties and institutions with a new spirit and meaning.
Ecology is rather like sex -- every new generation likes to think they were the first to discover it.
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
The nation that destroys its soil destroys itself.
I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.
How to be green? Many people have asked us this important question. It's really very simple and requires no expert knowledge or complex skills. Here's the answer. Consume less. Share more. Enjoy life.
The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.
We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted...So any nation which in its youth lives only for the day, reaps without sowing, and consumes without husbanding, must expect the penalty of the prodigal whose labor could with difficulty find him the bare means of life.
The shrinkage in the flora is due to a combination of clean-farming, woodlot grazing, and good roads. Each of these necessary changes of course requires a larger reduction in the acreage available for wild plants, but none of them requires, or benefits by, the erasure of species from whole farms, townships, or counties. There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with them.
And now, first and foremost, you can never afford to forget for a moment what is the object of our forest policy. That object is not to preserve forests because they beautiful, though that is good in itself; nor because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness, though that, too, is good in itself; but the primary object of our forest policy, as of the land policy of the United States, is the making of prosperous homes. It is part of the traditional policy of home making in our country. Every other consideration comes as secondary. You yourselves have got to keep this practical object before your minds: to remember that a forest which contributes nothing to the wealth, progress, or safety of the country is of no interest to the Government, and should be of little interest to the forester. Your attention must be directed to the preservation of forests, not as an end in itself, but as the means of preserving and increasing the prosperity of the nation.
Global thinking and local action both require understanding of ecological systems, but ecological management can be effective only if it takes into consideration the visceral and spiritual values that link us to the earth. Therefore ecological thinking must be supplemented by humanistic value judgments concerning the effect of our choices and actions on the quality of the relationship between humankind and earth, in the future as well as in the present.http://www.bookrags.com/Ren%C3%A9_Dubos
It's a morbid observation, but if every one on earth just stopped breathing for an hour, the greenhouse effect would no longer be a problem.
It is our task in our time and in our generation to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours.
When God created the first human beings, God led them around the garden of Eden and said: Look at my works! See how beautiful they are -- how excellent! For your sake I created them all. See to it you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to repair it.
There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.
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