Fine laws for those concerned about the environment, weak enforcement for those not concerned about it
— Gertrude Lübbe-Wolff
We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth
— Greta Thunberg
This is not climate denial of the Republican sort, where people simply pretend the science isn't real. This is climate denial of the status quo sort, where people accept the science, and indeed make long speeches about the immorality of passing on a ruined world to our children. They just deny the meaning of the science, which is that we must keep carbon in the ground
— Bill McKibben
The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life.
— John Dewey
We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective
— Kurt Vonnegut Jnr
When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here - the cougar, the panther, the lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, the deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc., - I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed an emasculated country.
I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of spring, for instance, thinking that I have the entire poem, and then to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places.
— Henry David Thoreau
A love of nature keeps no factories busy
— Aldous Huxley
Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I have hope for the human race
— HG Wells
Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper that we may record our emptiness
— Kahil Gibran
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day
— Anton Chekhov
That mammals larger than dinosaurs and roamers of the seas for millions of years were threatened with extinction by something as transitory as the sunk costs for a whaling fleet says much about human economics, consumption and technological power
— Peter J. Stoett, The International Politics of Whaling
The earth does not argue, Is not pathetic, has no arrangements, Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise, Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out
— Walt Whitman
As cruel a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life
— Rachel Carson
He that plants a tree, loves others besides himself
— English Proverb
...used declassified Soviet Ministry of Fishing reports to find that one Soviet factory ship had told the International Whaling Commission during the 1960s that it [sic] had killed 152 humpback and 156 blue whales. In fact the ship had taken 7,207 humpbacks and 1,433 blue whales and illegally killed 717 right whales, a species protected by the whaling commission since the 1930s