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We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
-American Indian Proverb
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It's a morbid observation, but if every one on earth just stopped breathing for an hour, the greenhouse effect would no longer be a problem.
-Jerry Adler
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Ecology is rather like sex -- every new generation likes to think they were the first to discover it.
-Michael Allaby
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That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.
-Marcus Aurelius
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The current collapse of industrial society may well be the planet's way of avoiding a larger death.
-Morris Bergman
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Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.
-Murray Bookchin
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As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with them.
-Louis Bromfield
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Global thinking and local action both require understanding of ecological systems, but ecological management can be effective only if it takes into consideration the visceral and spiritual values that link us to the earth. Therefore ecological thinking must be supplemented by humanistic value judgments concerning the effect of our choices and actions on the quality of the relationship between humankind and earth, in the future as well as in the present.
http://www.bookrags.com/Ren%C3%A9_Dubos
-Ren
The Wooing of Earth, p. 157, 1980
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The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.
-Havelock Ellis
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It cannot suffice to invent new machines, new regulations, new institutions. It is necessary to change and improve our understanding of the true purpose of what we are and what we do in the world. Only such a new understanding will allow us to develop new models of behavior, new scales of values and goals, and thereby invest the global regulations, treaties and institutions with a new spirit and meaning.
-Vaclav Havel, 2001
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The question of whether it's God's green earth is not at center stage, except in the sense that if so, one is reminded with some regularity that He may be dying.
-Edward Hoagland
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O if we but knew what we do when we delve or hew -- hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender to touch, her being so slender, that like this sleek and seeing ball but a prick will make no eye at all, where we, even where we mean to mend her we end her, when we hew or delve: after-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
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A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
-William James
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We, the generation that faces the next century, can add the solemn injunction that if we don't do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable.
-Petra Kelly
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It is our task in our time and in our generation to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours.
-John Fitzgerald Kennedy
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When God created the first human beings, God led them around the garden of Eden and said: Look at my works! See how beautiful they are -- how excellent! For your sake I created them all. See to it you do not spoil and destroy My world; for if you do, there will be no one else to repair it.
-R. Kohelet
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We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
-Aldo Leopold
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The shrinkage in the flora is due to a combination of clean-farming, woodlot grazing, and good roads. Each of these necessary changes of course requires a larger reduction in the acreage available for wild plants, but none of them requires, or benefits by, the erasure of species from whole farms, townships, or counties. There are idle spots on every farm, and every highway is bordered by an idle strip as long as it is; keep cow, plow, and mower out of these idle spots, and the full native flora, plus dozens of interesting stowaways from foreign parts, could be part of the normal environment of every citizen.
-Aldo Leopold
A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There - Idle Spots pp. 47-48., 1948, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987
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The practice of conservation must spring from a conviction of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right only when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community, and the community includes the soil, waters, fauna, and flora, as well as people.
-Aldo Leopold
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The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
-Aldo Leopold
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The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.
-Karl Marx
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We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
-Margaret Mead
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What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?
-Henry Miller
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Obviously, the answer to oil spills is to paper-train the tankers.
-Ralph Nader
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-Jos
Meditations in Quixote
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Books about Conservation
