#environmentalism

All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it. ↗

— Neal Stephenson

#urban-sprawl #lifestyle

Quand on a terminé sa toilette du matin, il faut faire soigneusement la toilette de la planète. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#earth #environment #environmental-protection #environmentalism

Unless government appropriately regulates oil developments and holds oil executives accountable, the public will not trust them to drill, baby, drill. And we must! ↗

— Sarah Palin

#environmental-degradation #government #oil #regulation #united-states

Environmental degradation is an iatrogenic disease induced by economic physicians who treat the basic malady of unlimited wants by prescribing unlimited growth.... Yet one certainly does not cure a treatment-induced disease by increasing the treatment dosage. ↗

— Herman E. Daly

#environment #environmentalism

People often ask, "What is the single most important environmental population problem facing the world today?" A flip answer would be, "The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem! ↗

— Jared Diamond

#error #misguidedness #population #problems #environmentalism

Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. 'To Fly' brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many denominations witness 'Blue Planet' and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth's environment ↗

— Carl Sagan

#environment #environmentalism #imax #omnimax #science

If human beings were to treat one another's personal property the way they treat the natural environment, we would view that behavior as anti-social and illegal. ↗

— Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew

#nature

We risk losing what nature is if we couch its value in human terms. ↗

— Richard Black

#nature #nature

Nature is richer than billionaires – its assets are so much more uncontaminated. Especially when oil spills expose corporate corruption. ↗

— Bauvard

#corporate-greed #environmentalism #nature #oil-spills #wealth

When we burn fossil fuel for energy we are, in qualitative terms, doing nothing more wrong than burning wood. Our wrongdoing, if that is an appropriate term, is taking energy from Gaia hundreds of times faster than it is naturally made available. We are sinning in a quantitative not a qualitative way. ↗

— James Lovelock

#nature