Quotes & Sayings About Environmentalism

Wine is a gateway drug to environmentalism. — Katherine Cole

Recycling and speed limits are bullshit. They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed. — Chuck Palahniuk

I feel part of the environment, not separate from it, as though I'm at home rather than visiting - as though I'm tapped into some eternal omnipresence beyond the transient physical forms. — Michael Sanders

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. — Michael Gurnow

Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the earth. It is the only habitable place we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live and we are compelled to share it; it is our only home ... the earth's biosphere seems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for we evolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have. — Joseph Guth

She leaned into me, and I could feel her hot breath against my ear. 'I want you to eat me,' she whispered. 'I want you to eat me like you're an angry Alaskan grizzly and I'm Timothy Treadwell. — Phillip Andrew Bennett Low

The test of a progressive policy is not private but public, not just rising income and consumption for individuals, but widening the opportunities and what Amartya Sen calls the 'capabilities' of all through collective action. But that means, it must mean, public non-profit initiative, even if only in redistributing private accumulation. Public decisions aimed at collective social improvement from which all human lives should gain. That is the basis of progressive policy - not maximising economic growth and personal incomes. Nowhere will this be more important than in tackling the greatest problem facing us this century, the environmental crisis. Whatever ideological logo we choose for it, it will mean a major shift away from the free market and towards public action, a bigger shift than the British government has yet envisaged. And, given the acuteness of the economic crisis, probably a fairly rapid shift. Time is not on our side. — Eric Hobsbawm

There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. ... I respect their views and I understand their motives, and I don't condemn them, but I'm not having it. To me, the conflict between science and religion is more important than these issues of science education or even environmentalism. I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization. — Steven Weinberg

There is no single concept of nature; it embraces everything that is fluid, changing, and mysterious. Ultimately, however, to "know nature" on earth is to live within it and to revere it in every way. — Carolyn Merchant

The average lawn is an interesting beast: people plant it, then douse it with artificial fertilizers and dangerous pesticides to make it grow and to keep it uniform-all so that they can hack and mow what they encouraged to grow. And woe to the small yellow flower that rears its head! — Michael Braungart

I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion. — Peter Thiel

And finally, there is another danger: the emergence of nonideological but very aggressive 'isms,' which are really quite new. Let me at least name them: We all care about human rights, but I am afraid of 'human rightism.' We all want to have a healthy environment, but I see the danger in environmentalism. To put it politically correctly, I admire the second gender, but I fear feminism. We all are enriched by other cultures, but not by multiculturalism. I am aware of the importance of voluntary associations, but I fear NGOism. — Vaclav Klaus

The object of their desire, the "essential" core of life, is something called authenticity, and finding the authentic has become the foremost spiritual quest of our time. It is a quest fraught with difficulty, as it takes place at the intersection of some of our culture's most controversial issues, including environmentalism and the market economy, personal identity and the consumer culture, and artistic expression and the meaning of life. — Andrew Potter

Gaia is a thin spherical shell of matter that surrounds the incandescent interior; it begins where the crustal rocks meet the magma of the Earth's hot interior, about 100 miles below the surface, and proceeds another 100 miles outwards through the ocean and air to the even hotter thermosphere at the edge of space. It includes the biosphere and is a dynamic physiological system that has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years. I call Gaia a physiological system because it appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life. Its goals are not set points but adjustable for whatever is the current environment and adaptable to whatever forms of life it carries. — James E. Lovelock

I believe that the only way that the human race is gonna survive is to start colonizing space and setting up colonies on the moon, and then space stations. — Ace Frehley

I've tried to approach environmentalism the same way I do my climbing: by setting small, concrete goals that build on each other. — Alex Honnold

There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increase its value, its could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest. — Peter Singer

When we over consume the Earth's resources, we create an economic imbalance in societies and in the world. Affluent people and affluent societies can afford to buy everything in large quantities. They have an abundance of wealth and think they have the license to waste. They use a great deal and leave others with very little. It is this imbalance between rich and poor that gives rise to crime, violence, prejudice, and other negative attitudes.

When some people cannot get what they need through honest hard work, and see others wasting what is so precious, they feel justified in taking it by force. The Earth can only produce enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed. Our greed and wasteful habits perpetuate poverty, which is violence against humanity. — Arun Gandhi

A clean pond is more useful than a dirty ocean. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Apocalyptic thinking happens on the left as well as on the right, and in environmentalism, that's a terrible approach to take. Because it isn't true. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Good environmentalism is good economics — Barber Conable

The wellspring for the passion that drove public speech and action in behalf of the environment was in large part religious and ethical. Environmentalism, in short, had become one version of nature religion in the lingering shadow of American transcendentalism. — Catherine L. Albanese

Earth is ancient now, but all knowledge is stored up in her. She keeps a record of everything that has happened since time began. Of time before time, she says little, and in a language that no one has yet understood. Through time, her secret codes have gradually been broken. Her mud and lava is a message from the past.
Of time to come, she says much, but who listens? — Jeanette Winterson

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future. — Al Gore

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. — Mark Hamilton Lytle

If we take care of our trees,
our trees will take care of us.
If we take care of our animals,
our animals will take care of us.
If we take care of our land,
our land will take care of us.
If we take care of our world,
our world will take care of us. — Matshona Dhliwayo

I am no ecological Pollyana. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some environmental 'realists' seem to believe is the more mature posture. Instead, I choose to dwell, as Emily Dickinson famously suggested, in possibility, where we cannot predict what will happen but we make space for it, whatever it is, and realize that our participation has value. This is grown-up optimism, where our bondedness with the rest of creation, a sense of profound interaction, and a belief in our shared ingenuity give meaning to our lives and actions on behalf of the more-than-human world. — Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Often I'll go outside and just place my hands on the soil, even if there's no work to do on it. When I am filled with worries, I do that and I can feel the energy of the mountains and of the trees. — Andy Couturier

Under the constitution, there was never meant to be a federal police force. Even an FBI limited only to investigations was not accepted until this century. Yet today, fueled by the federal government's misdirected war on drugs, radical environmentalism, and the aggressive behavior of the nanny state, we have witnessed the massive buildup of a virtual army of armed regulators prowling the States where they have no legal authority. The sacrifice of individual responsibility and the concept of local government by the majority of American citizens has permitted the army of bureaucrats to thrive. — Ron Paul

Climate science has been targeted by a major political movement, environmentalism, as the focus of their efforts, wherein the natural disasters of the earth system, have come to be identified with man's activities - engendering fear as well as an agenda for societal reform and control ... This greatly facilitates any conscious effort to politicize science via influence in such bodies where a handful of individuals (often not even scientists) speak on behalf of organizations that include thousands of scientists, and even enforce specific scientific positions and agendas. — Richard Lindzen

I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively, instead of skeptically and dictatorially. — E.B. White

The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price. That is the problem. — Wangari Maathai

...obscurantist feature in social scientists trying to combine pluralism with environmentalism. They are so preoccupied with the role of prejudice in creating hostile environments that they perpetually deny the obvious, that stereotypes are rough generalizations about groups derived from long-term observation. Such generalizations are usually correct in describing group tendencies and in predicting certain collective actions, even if they do not adequately account for differences among individuals. Nonetheless, as Goldberg explains, the self-described pluralist and prominent psychologist Gordon Allport went out of his way in The Nature of Prejudice (1954) to reject stereotypes as factually inaccurate as well as socially harmful. For Allport and a great many other social Scientists, nothing is intuitively correct unless it is politically so. — Paul Edward Gottfried

We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it. — Wendell Berry

We need to ground environmentalism on something other than data. — Charles Eisenstein

What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported-and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores-these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun. — John Brunner

I wish people had as much enthusiasm about unfucking the planet as they did about sports. Who wins on Sunday is pretty goddamned trivial compared to just about anything else. — Michael Brewer

The Holy Land is everywhere — Black Elk

I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? [ ... ] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it. — David Attenborough

My wife also contributed to my poison ivy education. She taught me women have an aversion to 'red, bumpy men' and are not the least bit aroused by any part of the male anatomy which happens to be infected. However, this was not a problem. My infestation was so severe, the act of scratching produced orgasmic waves of delight that made me consider scheduling weekly au naturel pilgrimages through lush, rolling fields of the devil vine. — Michael Gurnow

I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth. — James E. Lovelock

To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it. — Barbara Kingsolver

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations. — Svante Arrhenius

Few things in this world evoke scrotum-shriveling fear in a man like a group of frowning women, enraged to the point of atypical silence, ambling toward him with an obvious agenda. — Michael Gurnow

If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world is contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature. Anything becomes permissible. We return once more to the nightmare cultures of Hitler, Stalin, King Philip II, Montezuma, Caligula, Heliogabalus, Herod, the Pharaohs; Christ sacrificed himself in vain. — Edward Abbey

I don't think I understand that," Meg insisted. "How can you lust yourself into oblivion. "
"Oh, easily," Ekaterina answered. "The lust is for things, possessions. The weapon turns on the nature of possessions, the fact that every possession you own consumes a part of you. Tools, instruments, if they are more than conceits, these things do not defy the rule but they are exceptional enough they don't activate the weapon.
Consequently, the mission of these alleged scientists is to create generalized lust, a frenzied lust for things unconnected to any sense of utility. — Robert Stikmanz

Carter's renowned 1979 "malaise speech" [ ... ] is little remembered for what it actually was: a call to arms for fixing our nation's dire energy future. "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977
never" [ ... ] Carter was going to use all the weapons at his disposal: import quotas, public investment in coal, solar power, and alternative fuel, and [ ... ] "a bold conservation program" where "every act of energy conservation ... is more than just common sense; I tell you it is an act of patriotism. — Rachel Maddow

She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose. — Peter Heller

Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere. — David Suzuki

Mankind is busily manufacturing its way into extinction. — Steven Magee

In the course of all of the compass-spinning twists, roller coaster hills, and sphincter-contracting turns, I hadn't noticed that we had stopped at the top of a very large ridge. The beginning of the trail was not pleasant, inviting, or even remotely civil; it was recreational molestation at its best. — Michael Gurnow

What's wrong with being naked?
Zeena Schreck on AMLA to Christian Minister Jerry Johnston — Zeena Schreck

My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth's Riches knowing - while denying - that we'd be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid. — David Mitchell

In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole. — Edward Abbey

We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle. — Russell Banks

If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one. — Barry Commoner

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. — Michael Gurnow

The planet, saved for another day, stokes up
its slow-burning gases and toxic dust, gold rift and scarlet
gash that take our breath away; a world at its interminable
show of holy dying. And we go with it, the old
gatherer and hunter. To its gaudy-day, though the contribution
is small, adding our handsel of warm clay. — David Malouf

My goal is to draw a line with some 'flavor' to it. — Andy Couturier

Forests should not be walked on, they should be walked under and through. — Courtney M. Privett

Everything we personally own that's made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we're either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf. — Yvon Chouinard

So many people think you have to be rich and famous to really create an impact, and it's just not true. Especially when it comes to environmentalism. — Eva Longoria

The climate change debate is basically not about science; it is about ideology. It is not about global temperature; it is about the concept of human society. It is not about nature or scientific ecology; it is about environmentalism, about one - recently born - dirigistic and collectivistic ideology, which goes against freedom and free markets. — Vaclav Klaus

How would some townsman feel who loved his city, and knew that a band of farmers with their ploughs threatened his very pavements and would tear his high buildings down? As he would feel, fearing that turnips would thrive where his busses ran, so I felt and feared for Lisronagh. — Lord Dunsany

Just as we will spend large sums to preserve cities like Venice, even though future generations conceivably may not be interested in such architectural treasures, so we should preserve wilderness even though it is possible that future generations will care little for it. — Peter Singer

The idea that humans are yet intelligent enough to serve as stewards of the Earth is among the most hubristic ever. — James E. Lovelock

Environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s — Michael Crichton

Environmentalism is a luxury. Just like being a vegetarian is a luxury. When you have to worry about eating - you're not going to be worried about where the food's coming from, or who made your shoes. Poverty, whether planned or not planned, is a way of making environmentalism moot. — Sherman Alexie

Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible
it's to dismantle those systems. — Lierre Keith

Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. This retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came. — Peter Matthiessen

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans
vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming. — Paolo Bacigalupi

Did I just see you litter?'
'I'm driving a hybrid. It cancels out. — Michelle Hodkin

I think it is far more important to save one square mile of wilderness, anywhere, by any means, than to produce another book on the subject. — Edward Abbey

The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment. — Carl Sagan

Centrally planned economies are upended by out of control population. Their escape valve is eugenics. — A.E. Samaan

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

Humanity's current demand for energy is fundamentally unsustainable. The only feasible choice is to conduct a massive downscaling of all economic, industrial, and political operations. A decentralized, autonomous, and locally-based energy infrastructure is ultimately the only sustainable option. — Stacy Pettigrew

The Guardian's headline is 'How Going Green May Make You Mean.' We're inclined to think the chain of causation runs the other way - that people who are jerks to begin with gravitate toward verdant sanctimony. — James Taranto

I am here because I have to be here, as here I am supposed to be! All things should be, and usually are, found in their rightful places. Can you imagine how chaotic the world would be if nothing was in its correct place? — William O'Brien

We risk losing what nature is if we couch its value in human terms. — Richard Black

I have been impressed by the realization that a few men have virtually 'decided' what experiences count and even exist in the world. The language of Western science
the reigning construct of male hegemony
precludes the ability to express the experiential realities it talks about. Virtually all the actual experiences of this world, expressed through the manifest and mysterious characteristics of all the different beings, are unrepresented in the stainless steel edicts of experts. Where is the voice of the voiceless in the scientific literature, including the literature of environmental ethics? — Karen Davis

There are many paths leading to a garden and many experiences awaiting those who venture in. No matter what your motive - whether to grow healthy, delicious food; spend time outdoors feeling more alive than your desk job allows; help save the planet; find relaxation, solace, or healing; meet your neighbors; get your hands in the sweet earth; or discover for yourself just how abundant and generous nature can be - a garden rarely disappoints. It's a magnet for life in all its quirky, beautiful forms. — Jane Shellenberger

A good zoo," Stella said, "is a large domain. A wild cage. A safe place to be. It has room to roam and humans who don't hurt." She pauses, considering her words. "A good zoo is how humans make amends. — Katherine Applegate

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. — Naomi Wolf

No one will protect what they don't care about; and no one will care about what they have never experiened — David Attenborough

April is the cruelest month.' So begins T.S. Eliot's 1922 masterpiece, a 434-line poem titled 'The Waste Land.' Until my employment as a trail maintenance worker, this had simply been a line on a page, albeit a line fraught with metaphorical import and potential. Now I saw it for what it was - a big fat lie - because Eliot grew up in St. Louis and no one forgets what a Missouri summer is like. If the Nobel laureate had been truthful with himself, the opening verse would start out, 'June's a bitch. — Michael Gurnow

All must pay the debt of nature. — Annie Proulx

Reduction is the least observed of the three R's of environmentalism ('reduce, reuse, recycle') but it's probably the most important. Reuse and recycling are sensible measures in an over-productive society, but why not neutralise the problem of overproduction at the source? Instead of choosing to act efficiently at the end of a product's life cycle by reusing or recycling it, we should stop said product from being made in the first place by eliminating consumer demand for it. If the rainforests must be burned and the oceans poisoned to cater for the essentials of human life, then so be it and we'll call it an inevitable pity; but for that to happen in the name of games consoles, cell phones and chocolate fountains is a wanton and avoidable shame. — Robert Wringham

Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom. — Christopher Lasch

Extinction, the irrevocable loss of a species, causes pain that can never find relief. It is an ache that will pass from generation to generation for the rest of human history. — Callum Roberts

Environmentalism is not an upper-income issue, it's not a white issue, it's not a black issue, it's not a South or a North or an East or a West issue. It's an issue that all of us have a stake in. And if I can do anything to make sure that not just my daughter but every child in America has green pastures to run in and clean air to breathe and clean water to swim in, then that is something I'm going to work my hardest to make happen. — Barack Obama

They have taken the idea of nonharming, of gentleness toward the earth, to a very radical level. Even the weeds are not enemies. — Andy Couturier

We'll tell him his mother waits for him in heaven, I suppose."
"Is that a lie?"
"It's what we tell fools and children." She sighed. "Postulating a heaven gives man an out for having been unable to retain the paradise he was given here on earth. — Sheri S. Tepper

That's the key to walking through the Wall.... You have to first see it as not being a Wall, even though everyone you know still sees it as a Wall. — Kevin J. Shay

I don't see my artist friends as any more neurotic or addiction-prone than the others. The roommates I have had who were into triathlons or environmentalism were just as crazy as the poets, just as prone to tears over gardening or air conditioners, just as ready to kite a cheque or binge on cookie dough. — Russell Smith

I finally understood that I couldn't avoid working to provide for myself, but that can also be a wonderful
thing, a beautiful thing. — Andy Couturier

We all have a stake - equally. Because if we do not save the environment and save the Earth, then whatever we do in civil rights or in a war against poverty will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction and the brotherhood of the grave. — James Farmer

The war for the Narmada valley is not just some exotic tribal war, or a remote rural war or even an exclusively Indian war. Its a war for the rivers and the mountains and the forests of the world. All sorts of warriors from all over the world, anyone who wishes to enlist, will be honored and welcomed. Every kind of warrior will be needed. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, judges, journalists, students, sportsmen, painters, actors, singers, lovers ... The borders are open, folks! Come on in. — Arundhati Roy

My environmentalism reared its head around the age of ten when I inexplicably become obsessed with littering. For some reason I considered it my personal responsibility to pick up litter wherever I found it and yell at anyone I saw contributing to the problem (much to the horror of my mother). I was a ten-year-old on a mission to clean up the streets! But it was years later when I became a mother myself that concern for my kids' future really ignited my passion and set me on my course. Once I started reading and educating myself, there was no turning back. — Laurie David

I know that to personalize the Earth System as Gaia, as I have often done and continue to do in this book, irritates the scientifically correct, but I am unrepentant because metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread comprehension of the true nature of the Earth and an understanding of the lethal dangers that lie ahead. — James E. Lovelock