“In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.”

Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem.

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

Everything is connected to everything else.

By adopting the control strategy, the nation’s environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.

In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.

As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world – most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world’s poor.

My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically – and destructively – demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.

Technologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.

I’m such an advocate for animal rights and environmental rights.

The environmental crisis is a sign that the ecosphere is now so heavily strained that its continued stability is threatened. It is a warning that we must discover the source of this suicidal drive and master it before it destroys the environment-and ourselves.

I am passionate about exploring the confluence of environmental and human health. I believe that the goals of conservation must constantly revisit a stated purpose.

We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other creatures do.

Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.

The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.

When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.

Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.