Environmental Issue Quotes & Sayings

Climate change is not an environmental problem. It is a civilizational problem. Climate change is not just another issue. If it is not addressed in very short order, it will swamp every other issue facing us today — Ross Gelbspan

The gains we made in the United States that have made our country great have, in large part, been made over the opposition of major corporations. On nearly every issue, from fair labor standards, to the minimum wage, to environmental standards, to standards for a safe workplace, corporations have fought against them every step of the way. — Byron Dorgan

The pioneers and their new Indian partners amply displayed the American penchant for technological prowess, developing shore-to-shore windlasses and flatboat ferries to cross the rivers, innovations as vital to the country's progress as the steam engine and the telegraph. America's default toward massive waste and environmental havoc was also, and hilariously, perfected along the trail. Scammed by the merchants of Independence and St. Joe into overloading their wagons, the pioneers jettisoned thousands of tons of excess gear, food, and even pianos along the ruts, turning vast riverfront regions of the West into America's first and largest Superfund sites. On issue after issue - disease, religious strife, the fierce competition for water - the trail served as an incubator for conflicts that would continue to reverberate through American culture until our own day. — Rinker Buck

Many people who live in big countries like ours thought that we had resources that would work for us for many, many years, but that was a mistake. Our natural wealth corrupted us. In this country, you were among the first to raise environmental issues. In Russia, despite all of its problems today, people are concerned about the environment, and it's become a central issue on the agenda. — Mikhail Gorbachev

Nuclear power will be the Vietnam issue of the 1980s. — Jerry Brown

The Ministry places great importance and focus on the waste management issue as one of the most pressing priorities in the UAE, given its economic, social, environmental and medical effects. The Ministry addresses this issue through two approaches, the first in limiting the generation of waste form the source, by organizing awareness programs that target families and individuals, or by regulations and developing a national regulatory framework for waste management. The second revolves around the reuse and recycling of waste as a national commitment and one of the major objectives of the national agenda of the UAE Vision 2021. We all hope that we can strengthen the cooperation between the public and private sector in that domain, and encourage private companies to play a more vital role in waste management in a way that exceeds corporate social responsibility initiatives. — Anonymous

The single greatest issue for me as an environmentalist is climate change. I'd have to say that climate change is the single most important issue facing the environmental community and communities as a whole. — Jerome Ringo

On issue after issue, the polls - and these are not snapshot polls; these are polls over a consistent period of time - show that most Americans share what one could call core liberal or progressive values: investment in health care and education over tax cuts; fair trade over free trade; corporate accountability over deregulation; environmental protection over laissez-faire policies; defending Social Security and Medicare over privatizing them; raising the minimum wage over eliminating it. The country prefers progressive alternatives to the failed policies of the conservative right. — Katrina Vanden Heuvel

Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature, will not be fooled. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, an achievement that much of the Republican Party has been trying to undo over the past several decades. Richard Nixon signed into law four landmark federal bills: the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Environmental Pesticide Control Act, and the Endangered Species Act. He established the Environmental Protection Agency, and made many strong environmental appointments in his administration. As we saw in Section 2.2, it was when the Reagan administration came to power in 1980 that environmental concern began to become a partisan issue. — Dale Jamieson

We are committed to cleaning up the air and cleaning up the water. But we also are committed to a strong economy, and we are not going to allow the environmental issue to be used sometimes falsely and sometimes in a demagogic way basically to destroy the system-the industrial system that made this the great country it is. — Richard M. Nixon

'Green' is likely to be a big issue in the 2008 U.S. presidential election - largely in response to George Bush's suicidal refusal to engage with environmental issues. — Zac Goldsmith

Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us. — Bill Nye

I'm a latecomer to the environmental issue, which for years seemed to me like an excuse for more government regulation. But I can see that in rich societies, voters are paying less attention to economic issues and more to issues of the spirit, including the environment. — David Frum

Although reducing human emissions to the atmosphere is undoubtedly of critical importance, as are any and all measures to reduce the human environmental "footprint", the truth is that the contribution of each individual cannot be reduced to zero ... if we believe that the size of the human "footprint" is a serious problem (and there is much evidence for this) then a rational view would be that along with a raft of measures to reduce the footprint per person, the issue of population management must be addressed — Chris Rapley

We've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy. — Tim Wirth

The ecological crisis is a moral issue. — Pope John Paul II

And secondly, I would impose a significant state landfill tipping fee and use that tipping fee to fund the billion dollar bond issue that I want to create to produce the funds for all of the environmental challenges that we just went over. — Ed Rendell

A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with. I would rather go before the government with two people who have a competent understanding of an issue, and who therefore deserve a hearing, than with two thousand who are vaguely dissatisfied.
But even the most articulate public protest is not enough. We don't live in the government or in institutions or in our public utterances and acts, and the environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives. That is, I take it, simply a fact, and in the light of it we can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living. — Wendell Berry

Kyoto protocol is not a simple environmental issue, where you can say scientists are not unanimous. This is about international relations, this is about the economy, about trying to create a level playing field for big businesses throughout the world. You have to understand what is at stake, and that is why it is serious, ... — Margot Wallstrom

Vassals of an outdated ideology unrelated to the real world, they can, when questioned on this issue, only mumble neoliberal mantras that have delivered the world economic stagnation, rising inequality and global environmental crisis — Richard Flanagan

[D]id you really expect fairness on the environmental issue? For a swathe of reporters, this is not a matter of empirical reporting; it's a matter of faith. Bush cannot be pro-environment because he's Bush. — Andrew Sullivan

Truly, we do live on a 'water planet.' For us, water is that critical issue that we need. It's the most precious substance on the planet, and it links us to pretty much every environmental issue, including climate change, that we're facing. — Philippe Cousteau Jr.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent. — Alex Steffen

The issue of world environment has a special kind of urgency ... The issue is one of rich peoples and poor peoples, of the growing gap between the two, and of the rich fouling their own nests. — Gilbert F. White

We are all robustly defended against the very bad news regarding catastrophic climate change. We prefer to hear the soporifics of President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency, which "reassure" us that the United States is going to take dramatic action to fight it. Go back to sleep, no worries, we're doing something about it. You breathe a sigh of "relief" and think that maybe your grandchildren will have a future. Maybe the human species will continue a bit longer - or a lot longer. Meanwhile, what is so easy to miss in Guy's twenty or so pages of climate science documentation is that the implications are so immediate, so momentous, that the real issue is not your grandchildren's future, but yours! — Carolyn Baker

I think we have reached a stage now where we need to find solutions to economic injustice in the same place and in the same ways that we find solutions to sustainability. Sustainability on environmental grounds and justice in terms of everyone having a place in the production and consumption system - these are two aspects of the same issue. They have been artificially separated and have to be put back again in the Western way of thinking. — Vandana Shiva

The issue of environmental quality is one which transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a cause which can attract, and very sincerely, liberals, conservatives, radicals, reactionaries, freaks, and middle-class straights. — Russell Kirk

My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons. — Barry Commoner

The environmental movement's focus on the Keystone XL pipeline issue really used to baffle me. — Matthew Yglesias

I assume we will have figured out a way to efficiently utilize solar energy and tied that to an efficient way to use nuclear energy in such a way that it doesn't pose a serious environmental issue. — John Hickenlooper

As a consumer an individual expresses "personal or self-regarding wants and interests"; as a citizen she expresses her "judgements about what is right or good". The mistake of market approaches to environmental problems is that they transform an issue that requires public deliberation by citizens into one to be resolved by consumer preferences. The market responds only to those preferences that can be articulated through acts of buying and selling. Hence the interests of the commercially inarticulate, both those who are contingently so (the poor) and those who are necessarily so (future generations and non-humans) cannot be adequately represented. — John O'Neill

Address these environmental issues and you will address every issue known to man. And we keep dabbling in things that aren't really that important in the long term. — Ted Danson

People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue. — Michael Pollan

I urge Governments to considerably reduce funds allocated to the military, not only as a disarmament issue, but also as a potential contributor to social and environmental protection and call for the holding of referenda on this issue worldwide. — Alfred-Maurice De Zayas

I tell my environmental friends that they have won. Every issue we look at from an energy perspective is now also looked at from an environmental perspective. — Joe Barton

And an even bigger army of Catholic missionaries marched in on your heels and told the Africans that if they used the condoms, they'd all go to hell. Africa has a new environmental issue now - landfills overflowing with unused condoms. — Dan Brown

I have come to believe that extracting natural gas from shale using the newish technique called hydrofracking is the environmental issue of our time. And I think you should, too. — Sandra Steingraber

America has not led but fled on the issue of global warming. — John F. Kerry

I have long understood that climate change is not only an environmental issue - it is a humanitarian, economic, health, and justice issue as well. — Frances Beinecke

A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. The realization ought to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has always conventionally hovered over these occasions, and let us see the work that is to be done. — Wendell Berry

On almost every environmental issue I care about, in fact, I've been wrong at one point or another. I used to think that climate change was no big deal, that most environmental problems were massive exaggerations, that oil reserves were effectively unlimited, and more. — Ramez Naam

Americans increasingly understand that clean energy is more than just an environmental issue. It is crucial to reducing our dangerous dependence on foreign countries. — Martin Heinrich

Planting trees, I myself thought for a long time, was a feel-good thing, a nice but feeble response to our litany of modern-day environmental problems. In the last few years, though, as I have read many dozens of articles and books and interviewed scientists here and abroad, my thinking on the issue has changed. Planting trees may be the single most important ecotechnology that we have to put the broken pieces of our planet back together. — Jim Robbins

Climate change is not a major issue because it will cause sea level rises or temperature increases, since we know how to live at higher elevations and regulate the temperature within our homes. It is a major issue because ecosystems are finding it difficult to adapt to the rapidity of the climate and environmental changes and are dying off, thereby accelerating the species extinction that is already underway due to our consumption habits. — Shailesh Rao

The most important environmental issue is one that is rarely mentioned, and that is the lack of a conservation ethic in our culture. — Gaylord Nelson

Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them. — Lynn Margulis

Errors of reductionism and biodeterminism take over in such silly statements as "Intelligence is 60 percent genetic and 40 percent environmental." A 60 percent (or whatever) "heritability" for intelligence means no such thing. We shall not get this issue straight until we realize that the "interactionism" we all accept does not permit such statements as "Trait x is 29 percent environmental and 71 percent genetic." When causative factors (more than two, by the way) interact so complexly, and throughout growth, to produce an intricate adult being, we cannot, in principle, parse that being's behavior into quantitative percentages of remote root causes. The adult being is an emergent entity who must be understood at his own level and in his own totality. The truly salient issues are malleability and flexibility, not fallacious parsing by percentages. A trait may be 90 percent heritable, yet entirely malleable. — Stephen Jay Gould

Climate change isn't just an environmental issue; it's a technology, water, food, energy, population issue. None of this happens in a vacuum. — David Titley