Quotes

..in the early 1930s, most people living in cities got around on electric streetcars. Concerned that this wasn't the kind of environment in which they could sell a lot of buses, General Motors, using a series of front companies, began buying streetcar systems, tearing out the tracks and then selling the new, polluting bus systems back to the cities - usually with contracts that prohibited purchase of "any new equipment using fuel or means of propulsion other than gas."...GM was soon joined by Greyhound, Firestone Tire and Rubber, Standard Oil of California (also called Chevrom) and Mack Trucks. In 1949 - after these companies had destroyed more than 100 streetcar systems in more than 45 cities...GM, Chevron and Firestone were convicted of a criminal conspiracy...They were fined $5000 each and the executives who organised the scheme were fined $1 each

At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, "thus far and no further." If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, "If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour"

When we heal the earth, we heal ourselves

It is said that the darkest hour comes just before dawn. I hope so, since in environmental terms the 20th century has certainly been a long, dark night

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them

The highest wisdom has but one science - the science of the whole - the science explaining the whole creation and man's place in it

At least 150,000 anthropogenic or human made chemicals at a total that increases by 2,000 each year end up in the oceans

..put the environmental lobby out of business....There is no greater imperative....If the petroleum industry is to survive, it must render the environmental lobby superfluous, an anachronism

You must turn the public against environmentalists or you will lose your environmental battle as surely as the U.S. Timber industry has lost theirs

If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy long ago

I think that I shall never see, A poem lovely as a tree

Population growth is the primary source of environmental damage

The big corporations, our clients, are scared shitless of the environmental movement.....They sense that there's a majority out there and that the emotions are all on the other side-if they can be heard. They think the politicians are going to yield up to the emotions. I think the corporations are wrong about that. I think the companies will have to give in only at insignificant levels. Because the companies are too strong, they're the establishment. The environmentalists are going to have to be like the mob in the square in Romania before they prevail

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell

There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed