Quotes & Sayings About Humans And The Environment

To be human is to care for your fellow human beings and protecting the environment. — Jacque Fresco

The entire cosmos is a cooperative. The sun, the moon, and the stars live together as a cooperative. The same is true for humans and animals, trees, and the Earth. When we realize that the world is a mutual, interdependent, cooperative enterprise
then we can build a noble environment. If our lives are not based on this truth, then we shall perish. — Buddhadasa

Is it wrong of me to propose a ceasefire agreement between humans and whales and dolphins, I know it is in actuality a one sided massacre, but so was Bosnia and there the ceasefire is holding, so would it be nice to have a declaration backing a ceasefire between us mammals? — Steve Merrick

Humans are incapable of securely storing high-quality cryptographic keys, and they have unacceptable speed and accuracy when performing cryptographic operations. (They are also large, expensive to maintain, difficult to manage, and they pollute the environment. It is astonishing that these devices continue to be manufactured and deployed. But they are sufficiently pervasive that we must design our protocols around their limitations.) — Charlie Kaufman

In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences. The — Sebastian Junger

Fundamentally, if you look at where the environmental issues are coming from, it's all because of humans and our impact on the environment, so while it's true that one individual is not going to sufficiently fix the environment, it is a necessary thing. — David Filo

So you know that all living things share the same energy source and that every action that humans do to nature will affect everything on this planet. — Alison Cooklin

Conversely, we humans are born premature and highly dependent newborns whose brains are shaped through years of interactions with our caretakers and the environment. — Louis Cozolino

In our commitment to raise healthy, conscious children and create a healthy world, it is hard to understand how people can choose to spend money for something that not only does not work, but poisons humans and the environment. — Gabriel Cousens M.D.

Up until then humans had displayed some innovative adaptations and behaviours, but their effect on their environment had been negligible. They had demonstrated remarkable success in moving into and adjusting to various habitats, but they did so without drastically changing those habitats. The settlers of Australia, or more accurately, its conquerors, didn't just adapt, they transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition. — Yuval Noah Harari

Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do. — William McDonough, Michael Braungart

The frontier in space, embodied in the space colony, is one in which the interactions between humans and their environment is so much more sensitive and interactive and less tolerant of irresponsibility than it is on the whole surface of the Earth. — Rusty Schweickart

Humans need challenges to overcome, just like a muscle needs resistance to grow. In a zero-gravity environment, an astronaut's muscles atrophy because there is no resistance. The government giving you a bunch of handouts and living your life for you is the equivalent of doing push-ups in outer space. Big government is like the void of space - it's massive, constantly expanding, and if we immerse ourselves in it, we'll simply wither away. — Adam Carolla

While ants exist in just the right numbers for the rest of the living world, humans have become too numerous. If we were to vanish today, the land environment would return to the fertile balance that existed before the human population explosion. Only a dozen or so species, among which are the crab louse and a mite that lives in the oil glands of our foreheads, depend on us entirely. But if ants were to disappear, tens of thousands of other plants and animal species would perish also, simplifying and weakening land ecosystems almost everywhere. — E. O. Wilson

I believe that the best way to create good living conditions for any animal, whether it's a captive animal living in a zoo, a farm animal or a pet, is to base animal welfare programs on the core emotion systems in the brain. My theory is that the environment animals live in should activate their positive emotions as much as possible, and not activate their negative emotions any more than necessary. If we get the animal's emotions rights, we will have fewer problem behaviors ... All animals and people have the same core emotion systems in the brain. — Temple Grandin

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it - and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That's why Native people were guarding it. — Gloria Steinem

The most precious gift God gave humans is reason. Its best use is the search for knowledge. To know the human environment, to know the earth and galaxies, is to know God. Knowledge (science) is the best form of prayer. — Fatema Mernissi

We forget that we humans are animals, inextricably connected to the world and everything in it. In the rush to bring GMO food to the world because it was good for us, nobody had asked the question whether it would be good for the world. — Kenneth Eade

In his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil identified a hugely important and fundamental property of technology: when you shift to an information-based environment, the pace of development jumps onto an exponential growth path and price/performance doubles every year or two. — Salim Ismail

The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves. — Ayn Rand

Detecting and culling infected birds is still the key, and for that we have to compensate the owners of chicken whose flocks are killed. And we have to limit interaction between humans and birds, which is a huge challenge within an environment where people are used to living very close to their chickens. — David Nabarro

As Licklider explained, the sensible goal was to create an environment in which humans and machines "cooperate in making decisions." In other words, they would augment each other. "Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. — Walter Isaacson

Averting the looming (pick your favorite term) catastrophe, time bomb, crisis, or emergency, requires us to hew to their worldview, one in which we humans are the problem and the Earth is the object to be saved. The biggest and most influential environmental groups routinely preach a message of doom. They regularly claim, for instance, that technology is dangerous (their opposition to nuclear and GMOs are obvious examples of this mindset) and that industrial development must be stopped in order to the save the planet. However, the painful paradox is that they are aiming to stop many of the innovations that are helping to improve the environment and raise the living standards of millions of people. They are also promoting energy policies that would be ruinous for the environment they say they want to protect. — Robert Bryce

In the 24 hours since this time yesterday, over 200,000 acres of rainforest have been destroyed in our world. Fully 13 million tons of toxic chemicals have been released into our environment. Over 45,000 people have died from starvation, 38,000 of them children. And more than 130 plant and animal species have been driven to extinction by the actions of humans. And all this just since yesterday. — Thom Hartmann

The word "veganism" denotes a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude - as far as is possible and practical - all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals. — Donald Watson

We shall have to stop thinking of technology as something invulnerable that is merely used by humans, and view it as part of a greater cybernetic ecology all around us. The key distinction in an environment is not between 'natural' and 'artificial', but between semantic and dynamic: intention and behaviour. Biology has already drawn these lines, and through us, it will integrate the inanimate with the animate in information systems, until we no longer see a pertinent difference between the two. — Mark Burgess

Natural selection has been described as an environment selectively screening for those who will have progeny. Where humans are concerned, though, this is an extremely limiting viewpoint. Reproduction by sex tends toward experiment and innovation. It raises many questions, including the ancient one about whether environment is a selective agent after the variation occurs, or whether environment plays a pre-selective role in determining the variations which it screens. Dune did not really answer those questions: it merely raised new questions which Leto and the Sisterhood may attempt to answer over the next five hundred generations. - THE DUNE CATASTROPHE AFTER HARQ AL-ADA — Frank Herbert

The space-dwelling nations of Shis'urna divided the universe into three parts. In the middle lay the natural environment of humans - space stations, ships, constructed habitats. Outside those was the Black - heaven, the home of God and everything holy. And within the gravity well of the planet Shis'urna itself - or for that matter any planet - lay the Underworld, the land of the dead from which humanity had had to escape in order to become fully free of its demonic influence. — Ann Leckie

The greatest gift that humans have is the ability to think. Of all the creatures in the world, humans are physically the most ill-equipped. A human cannot fly like a bird, outrun a leopard, swim like an alligator, nor climb trees like a monkey. A human doesn't have the eyes of an eagle, nor the claws and teeth of a wild cat. Physically, humans are helpless and defenseless; a tiny insect can kill them. But nature is reasonable and kind. Nature's greatest gift to humankind is the ability to think. Humans can create their own environment, whereas animals have to adapt to their environment. — Shiv Khera

For the most part we humans live with the false impression of security and a feeling of being at home in a seemingly familiar and trustworthily physical and human environment. But when the expected course of everyday life is interrupted, we realize that we are like shipwrecked people trying to keep their balance on a miserable plank in the open sea, having forgotten where they came from and not knowing whether they are drifting. But once we fully accept this, life becomes easier and there is no longer any disappointment. — Albert Einstein

We line up and make a lot of noise about big environmental problems like incinerators, waste dumps, acid rain, global warming and pollution. But we don't understand that when we add up all the tiny environmental problems each of us creates, we end up with those big environmental dilemmas. Humans are content to blame someone else, like government or corporations, for the messes we create, and yet we each continue doing the same things, day in and day out, that have created the problems. Sure, corporations create pollution. If they do, don't buy their products. If you have to buy their products (gasoline for example), keep it to a minimum. Sure, municipal waste incinerators pollute the air. Stop throwing trash away. Minimize your production of waste. Recycle. Buy food in bulk and avoid packaging waste. Simplify. Turn off your TV. Grow your own food. Make compost. Plant a garden. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. If you don't, who will? — Joseph Jenkins

It may be said that the basic characteristic of human behavior in general is that humans personally influence their relations with the environment and through that environment personally change their behavior, subjugating it to their control. — Lev S. Vygotsky

Unfortunately for the existing mature systems in nature, the rapid expansion of the human bubble is destroying them. Unfortunately for us, we can't exist without them any more than a living person can exist without oxygen or a body can exist without a head. In this sense, it is actually a conceptual error to define the environment as the rest of the biosphere save humans, and think of ourselves as apart from it, since we can't exist without it. — Jacob Lund Fisker

I think the greatest challenge in environmentalism and the most rewarding challenge is trying to figure out how humans can meet their needs while protecting the environment. — Gale Norton

Embracing our environment is a good direction, a very spiritual direction. It's too Aristotelian to separate man from the animals and man; humans from the environment. — Surya Das

The earth is at piece, there is no hunger, there is no violence,the environment is healed, honesty, curtesy and kindness practiced by all, our world has never been more ... perfect.In latest it is no longer our world, we've been invaded by an alien raise to occupy bodies of almost all human beings on the planet and the few humans who survived are on the run. — Stephenie Meyer

It is clear that something is seriously lacking in the way we humans are going about things. But what is it that we lack? The fundamental problem, I believe, is that at every level we are giving too much attention to the external, material aspects of life while neglecting moral ethics and inner values. By inner values, I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection, and warm-heartedness-or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being. This is the spiritual principle from which all other positive inner value emerge. — Dalai Lama XIV

When I work with experimental gadgets, like new variations on virtual reality, in a lab environment, I am always reminded of how small changes in the details of a digital design can have profound unforeseen effects on the experiences of the humans who are playing with it. The slightest change in something as seemingly trivial as the use of a button can sometimes completely alter behavior patterns.
For instance, Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one's avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy's lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of gadgets. It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering. — Jaron Lanier

Humans are not disabled. A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitations, but can transcend disability through technological innovation. — Hugh Herr

Another potentiality of our irrepressible juvenility is a capacity to maintain until the onset of senility an active creative interaction with our environment. We persist in exploring, investigating, inventing, discovering. In these respects humans of all eras, in all societies, all ages of life, are more like baby chimps and not at all like the sedate and rigidly conforming adult chimpanzee, who hasn't changed much since she was five or six years old. — Louise J. Kaplan

Humans are a great survivor species but our survival will be pretty grim if all of the plants and animals we depend on die out. That's why any human survival strategy has to include a plan to maintain our environment roughly in the state that it's in now. — Annalee Newitz

Modern man has made no significant leaps in the evolution of consciousness for thousands of years. In fact, we may even be less intelligent than some of the civilizations that have preceded us. Scientists have speculated that the gap of intelligence between great thinkers such as Einstein and Tesla compared to the average human is far greater than the gap between the average human and contemporary apes. What is it that is blocking us from achieving a superior level of intelligence?
Aside from the mental conditioning that our culture has been subjected to, I believe that it is due to an utter lack of understanding human nature. Modern humans are raised in such a negative environment. The corruption of our educational system, economic structure, and media outlets has resulted in a state of ignorance common amongst most individuals. — Joseph P. Kauffman

Human beings have evolved to be extremely good at identifying other individual humans. The race's survival depends on it. A guard lets the wrong person through the gate, and a whole settlement is wiped out. There are a million ways to tell two human beings apart. Not just appearance, either. Gait, odor, pheromones, speech patterns, dialect, nervous habits... even the way people breathe. Even parents of identical twins have little difficulty telling them apart, despite the fact that they are genetically identical and were raised in exactly the same environment, because of tiny differences in appearance and behavior that accrue as the result of differing experiences. The ability of one human to recognize another by appearance is especially acute when it comes to heterosexual males observing nubile females. There is nothing on Earth men pay more attention to than the appearance of sexually attractive young women. — Robert Kroese

Veganism is about nonviolence. It is about not engaging in harm to other sentient beings; to oneself; and to the environment upon which all beings depend for life. In my view, the animal rights movement is, at its core, a movement about ending violence to all sentient beings. It is a movement that seeks fundamental justice for all. It is an emerging peace movement that does not stop at the arbitrary line that separates humans from nonhumans. — Gary L. Francione

The ability of the humans to not only function in space but be very functional when they arrive at their destination, those are the kinds of things we're learning from the science. Fuel transfer technologies and all the things we can learn about the space environment are all valuable to us for pressing on out. — Kevin A. Ford

If we humans are good at anything, it's thinking we've got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance. — David Suzuki

Music will still be a big part of our environment. The Bible talks about choirs of angels and how there is singing in Heaven. We're going to have the greatest choirs, the greatest bands and symphony orchestras, the greatest music that the world has ever known. The world has never even heard music yet compared to what we're going to have there! If humans can make the beautiful music they have learned to make with these hand-made instruments, think what God can do supernaturally! — David Berg

Luckily, we humans evolved not only mental habits that lead us into emotional difficulty but also faculties through which we can free ourselves from them. The same skills we have used for millennia to understand and thrive in our environment can help us understand how our minds create unnecessary suffering and how to free ourselves from it. — Ronald D. Siegel

Human beings, who were created to live in harmony with each other, the earth, and God, now find themselves distanced from or at odds with their fellow humans, their physical surroundings, and their Lord. Redemption, then, consists in healing these breaches and restoring right relationships among all of these parties.
The things we eat play a part in this. The contemporary American diet is too often a case study in alienation, consisting as it does of foods that come from all over the world and are available all of the time ... just as global communication technologies erode the time people spend talking in person to people they actually know, so the constant availability of foods from all over the world erodes the connection people have to their own local environment and the foods associated with it. — Margaret Kim Peterson

Only very few - only humans, as far as we know - achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the 'house of being' - Heidegger took this phrase from Zarathustra's animals, which inform the convalescent: 'the house of being rebuilds itself eternally'; it is also the vehicle for the tendencies to run away from that house with which, by means of its inner surpluses, humans move towards the open. It need hardly be explained why the oldest parasite in the world, the world above, only appears with the second transcendence. — Peter Sloterdijk

Shallow ecology is anthropocentric, or human-centred. It views humans as above or outside nature, as the source of all value, and ascribes only instrumental, or 'use', value to nature. Deep ecology does not separate humans - or anything else - from the natural environment. It does see the world not as a collection of isolated objects but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. Deep ecology recognizes the intrinsic value of all human beings and views humans as just one particular strand in the web of life. — Fritjof Capra

Such a social-media environment; it is merely the most recent and most efficient way that humans have found to scratch a prehistoric itch. The compelling nature of social media, then, can be traced back in part to the evolution of the social brain, as — Tom Standage

Factory farming is terrible for the environment - not to mention that it's gross. The best thing you can do, if you think about it, is to become a vegetarian and just spread the word. The world would change for the better for animals, humans, and the planet if everyone took that step. — Christofer Drew

Some time ago we discovered the carbon cycle - a long-term set of chemical reactions that govern climates based on how much carbon is free in the atmosphere. At that point, it became clear that humans were affecting our environments far more profoundly than we realized. By releasing so much carbon and greenhouse gas into the environment, we're making long-term changes to every aspect of the natural world. — Annalee Newitz

Industrial civilization has held us in a subhuman state all our lives, and we now have the opportunity to discover the powers of the universe coursing through us and our environment. Likewise, we have the extraordinary privilege as consciously self-aware humans of intentionally participating with those powers in an intimate, passionate, caring relationship with the universe. — Carolyn Baker

If you're reading this book, you're probably already interested in being green, and almost certainly already a parent (or about to become one), so I won't trouble too much with the semantics of what 'being green' means, but just say that doing the 'green' thing here means being as environmentally friendly as possible, while considering your child's everyday personal health as well, and taking into account social-justice issues to some degree, because no-one is an island and humans and animals are part of the environment too. Even if you're new to this, it's entirely
possible, with a little helping hand, to form new, green lifestyle habits, so long as you're prepared to take baby steps to begin with (and pardon the pun). — Zion Lights

The greatest danger hanging over our children and grandchildren is initiation of changes that will be irreversible on any time scale that humans can imagine. — James Hansen

The philosopher Stephen Schwartz has argued that there are only four differences between born and unborn humans, and none of the differences justifies depriving unborn humans of the right to life.143 Schwartz uses the acronym SLED to summarize these differences: Size Level of development Environment Degree of dependency — Trent Horn

This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours. — Douglas Coupland

Seeing that humans in modern cultures were destroying their environment for the sake of self-indulgence, the Dokkalfar focused their attention on poorer nations, whose terrain still flourished. A century of ethnic cleansing, deforestation, and war assured the land weakened and humans stayed in abject poverty. The result was a perfect contrast. In certain parts of the world, millions of children died of starvation and disease while other countries held excesses and riches never before seen. Earth became a place of greedy extremes. Societies lost the ability to relate to one another, choosing instead to focus on their own. No one noticed the one common theme every culture held.
The world itself was dying. — Elizabeth Isaacs

Based on the medical evidence that clearly states that being above 10,000 feet is hazardous to the health of sea level adapted humans, it is clear that all of the manned facilities on top of the 13,796 feet Mauna Kea summit in Hawaii should be removed and the summit restored back to its native environment. — Steven Magee

Think how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things. We talked about how animals don't just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation. While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk - which per gram is several times stronger than steel - at room temperature in water. — William Powers

[About reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, age 14, in the back seat of his parents' sedan. I almost threw up. I got physically ill when I learned that ospreys and peregrine falcons weren't raising chicks because of what people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with chemicals. [That a corporation would create a product that didn't operate as advertised] was shocking in a way we weren't inured to. — Carl Safina

When viewed at the next quantum level of perspective, from which the Earth is seen as an organism and humans are seen as microorganisms, the human species looks like a menace to the planet. In fact, the human race is looking a lot like a disease
comprised of organisms excessively multiplying, mindlessly consuming, and generating waste with little regard for the health and well-being of its host
planet Earth. — Joseph Jenkins