On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, 20 million Americans launched the modern environmental movement.
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 sowed the seeds that triggered a national environmental consciousness. Today, 48 years later, we stand on the threshold of environmental disaster.
President Trump slashes environmental regulations that have given us clean air and clean water, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt marches to the beat of Trump’s drummer by denying consensus among scientists, and Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke seems unacquainted with the basic concepts of natural resource conservation.
Here are a few thoughts from some of the great minds of our time for the rest of us to ponder:
“For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.”
“There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”
— Rachel Carson
“The idea of wilderness needs no defenses, it only needs more defenders.”
“God bless America. Let’s save some of it.”
— Edward Abbey
“In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.”
— Robert Ingersoll
“To keep every cog and every wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
— Aldo Leopold
“The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues — self-restraint.”
“The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues — self-restraint.”
— Edwin Way Teale
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
— Aldo Leopold
“The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.”
— Chief Seattle
“I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
“A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.”
— John James Audubon
“The purpose of conservation: the greatest good to the greatest number of people for the longest time.”
— Gifford Pinchot
“For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can even describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected.”
— Jane Goodall
“We cannot solve the problems we have created with the same thinking that created them.”
— Albert Einstein
“Live simply so that others may simply live.”
— Ghandi
“In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught.”
— Baba Dioum
“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on — and have found that none of these finally satisfies … what remains? Nature remains.”
— Walt Whitman
