Environmentalism

"The destruction of the planet’s web of life is a screaming-ambulance-siren problem not merely because it is the other main driver of our climate crisis but in and of itself. Nobody should have to point out that it is appalling to lose a single species to human activity, let alone the current reality of over 150 species a day. Nobody should be numb to such a biological apocalypse, to such wholesale killing caused not by somebody else over there but by each and every one of us living in the toxic, genocidal, ecocidal machine we call civilisation."

"When plants and animals parted company on their evolutionary journey millions of years ago, plants became the givers and animals the takers. But plants call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without plants, there would be no animals and certainly no humans. What is increasingly lost on today’s humanity is that without them, there is nothing. Instead, humans have waged war on the planet’s grasslands and forests. In just a few centuries, humanity has destroyed all the major forests, wetlands, and grasslands around the world, leaving but tiny remnants. People are the quintessential takers. Biting the hand that feeds us isn’t enough; we murder the givers."

"As Earth's most messy, destructive and defective animal, man's record gives him little cause for pride. Our present intellectual superiority is no guarantee of great wisdom or survival power in our genes."

"The Environmental movement is, you might say, a movement of repressed Romantics."

"Technology… is a simple term that covers a phenomenal diversity of different kinds of things. […] If someone were coming at you with a hammer, intent on doing you damage, my guess is you wouldn't focus on how to give them a different kind of hammer. You would understand that the damage is a result not of the technology but of the goals or the ethics of the person who's wielding it. And as long as our society doesn't place much emphasis on external environmental costs, remains preoccupied with the near term, considers it acceptable to have wide gap between the rich and the poor, and so forth and so on, so long as that's true, there's no technology which is going to give us a fundamental solution. At best, different technologies will buy us time to make the changes that we need to make socially and institutionally, and culturally."

"Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening."

"Environmentalists have long been fond of saying that the sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away."

"…it is clear that the human race is slowly progressing towards human enhancement technologies in order to improve themselves and achieve “ageless bodies and happy souls” but the process of gaining these abilities comes at the cost of the environment which by the end of the day, directly or indirectly, harms other living beings and puts them at risk."

"Earth has undergone radical changes throughout its [4.5] billion-year history, and as such, it would be curious if it had just now reached the state that is intrinsically valuable and ought to be preserved in perpetuity."

"Baconian science is at the root of the apocalypse. We have been blessed by advances in medicine, agriculture and engineering. Science has done exactly what we asked of it and now we are set for annihilation. If European science had petered out after the discoveries of the seventeenth century, we would be less numerous and [the] Earth would not be warming."

"Don't waste the Earth - It is our Jewel!"

"Sometimes the roots of a tree may be firmer than the foundations of a house. When the floor starts shaking, wouldn’t it be safer to catch hold of the branch of a tree? The times are so difficult that you may find a branch more secure than the slabs that make up the floor. Even a small window may prove more useful than a door. In the midst of earth tremors, the supple, living branch will not break; that is why you should focus on studying the nature of things. It is silly not to make use of what is growing right by the window. Only a madman needlessly uproots a plant that he himself is unable to cultivate. Likewise, it is only creatures of falsehood that try to encircle the path and force the traveler to deviate. But on the branches of life one can leave the signs of the true path. So let us protect every branch that grows by the window. When necessary, let the leaves of the garden preserve our work and protect us from the whirlwind—this means that the whirlwind is raging. I am explaining that you should not fear the whirlwind, for it is bringing flowers from every corner of the world. The roots that make up remedies often come from widely scattered places. 231."

"The one factor that you can’t find on a spreadsheet is the willingness of the people in government to lead change, And in Denmark every single one of them is engaged and willing to do whatever it takes to get Denmark to be a leader in electric vehicles."

"All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated."

"Babies are the enemies of the human race. . . . Let's consider it this way: by the time the world doubles its population, the amount of energy we will be using will be increased sevenfold which means probably the amount of pollution that we are producing will also be increased sevenfold. If we are now threatened by pollution at the present rate, how will we be threatened with sevenfold pollution by, say, 2010 A.D., distributed among twice the population? We'll be having to grow twice the food out of soil that is being poisoned at seven times the rate."

"Were we and the rest of the back-boned animals to disappear overnight, the rest of the world would get on pretty well."

"Environmental and are at root social crises. They are caused by profound problems in the social world, by elites, and the hierarchical control of decision-making and allocation of resources in profit-driven, expansionistic, ecocidal capitalist societies. As social problems, environmental crises require social solutions, namely radical political change seeking to create just, democratic, and sustainable societies. What we today call “natural disasters,” are at [the] root [of] social disasters that must be addressed if we are to solve the global . We must not only transform our and speciesist identities, our arrogant and vainglorious forms of human supremacism and pathological alienation, [but] we must also transform our growth-oriented, profit-driven, meat-based, fossil fuel-addicted societies. For millennia, the western world above all has lived by the philosophy of humans first, even humans only. It is now time for a new philosophy of earth first whereby humanity begins the arduous process of -- radically reducing their population numbers and consumption levels, rewilding natural environments and reserving vast habitats for wildlife alone, and shifting from a growth-oriented to a steady-state sustainable economy."

"If you want to contribute to the fight against global warming, live in a city in a high-rise apartment—where radiant heat seeps through walls into other people’s units, lowering heating costs—and commute by subway."

"In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops."

"If H[omo] sapiens does not go extinct, the human population will decline drastically as we will be forced to return to making a living as hunter‐gatherers or simple horticulturalists. Also, the earth after the collapse of human civilization will be a very different place than the biosphere that supported the rise of civilization. There will be a long-lasting legacy of altered climate, landscapes, and biogeochemical cycles, depleted and dispersed stocks of fossil fuels, metals, and nuclear ores, and diminished biodiversity. The most powerful species in the 3.5-billion-year history of life has transformed the earth and left a mark that will endure long after its passing."

"History offers a mixed message about the capacity of humans to innovate and act in time to avoid collapse. At local and regional scales, many multiple past civilizations (e.g., Greece, Rome, Angkor Wat, Teotihuacan) failed to adapt to changing social and ecological conditions and crashed catastrophically. At the same time, human ingenuity and technological innovations allowed the global population and economy to grow at near-exponential rates. This growth has been fueled by exploiting new energy sources, transitioning among animal, hydro, wind, wood, coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, photovoltaic solar, geothermal, and others. The implications of past localized collapses and global growth are of questionable relevance to the current situation, however, because now, for the first time in history, humanity is facing a global chemical energy limit. The earth-space battery paradigm provides a simple framework for understanding the historical effects of humans on the energy dynamics of the biosphere, including the unalterable thermodynamic boundaries that now pose severe challenges to the future of humankind. Living biomass is the energy capital that runs the biosphere and supports the human population and economy. There is an urgent need not only to halt the depletion of this biological capital but also to move as rapidly as possible toward an approximate equilibrium between NPP [net annual primary production] and respiration. There is simply no reserve tank of biomass for planet Earth. The laws of thermodynamics have no mercy. Equilibrium is inhospitable, sterile, and final."

"We know more now than we did just a few years ago. New solutions are close at hand. It's time to put our best minds to work; to turn technology and the power of the marketplace to the advantage of the environment; to create; to innovate; to tip the scales in favor of recovery, restoration, and renewal. Every American expects and deserves to breathe clean air, and as President, it is my mission to guarantee it -- for this generation and for the generations to come. If we take this commitment seriously, if we believe that every American expects and deserves clean air, and then we act on that belief, then we will set an example for the rest of the world to follow."

"We're so self-important. Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I'm tired of this shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day. I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren't enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me. The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn't going anywhere. We are! We're going away. Pack your shit, folks. We're going away. And we won't leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet'll be here and we'll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet'll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, "Why are we here?" "Plastic... asshole.""

"As a theology, environmentalism speaks deeply to America’s elites. Its moral absolutes affirm them, adding meaning to their otherwise secular world. The collapse of mainline Protestantism left a void in the hearts of America’s ruling class. The environmental movement fills it. Seen this way, the movement’s new priorities make sense. Environmentalism as a religion is more compelling than environmentalism as a means to save birds or clean up some river in Maine. After a while, details about the natural world begin to seem irrelevant. Compared to questions of virtue and salvation, they’re not that interesting."

"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself."

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe around us, the less taste we shall have for destruction."

"I want to make it clear, if there is ever a conflict (between environmental quality and economic growth), I will go for beauty, clean air, water, and landscape."

"The growth and progress upon which we looked back with such pride had committed mankind to living on a scale that exceeds the sustainable carrying capacity of this finite planet, and the leaders of nations continued to devote far more effort toward attempting to prolong overshoot than toward undoing it. Reluctance to face facts was driving us to make bad matters worse. The faster the present generation draws down the fossil energy legacy upon which persistently exuberant lifestyles now depend, the less opportunity posterity will have to live in anything like the same way or the same numbers. Yet most contemporary political proposals for solving problems of economic stagnation or inequity amount to plans for speeding up the rate of drawdown of non-renewable resources."

"The world we live in is finite, so there are potent physical and biological limits constraining economic growth, social progress, and other aspects of human living."

"We will look upon the earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us."

"I've often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers."

"The weight of our civilization has become so great, it now ranks as a global force and a significant wild card in the human future along with the Ice Ages and other vicissitudes of a volatile and changeable planetary system"

"“Green" issues make headlines these days, but many seem unaware that without the "blue" there could be no green, no life on Earth and therefore none of the other things that humans value. Water-the blue-is the key to life. With it, anything is possible; without it, life does not exist."

"Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind."

"We hear the term “climate” every day, so it is worth thinking about what we actually mean by it. Obviously, “climate” is not the same as weather. The climate is one of Earth’s fundamental life support systems, one that determines whether or not we humans, and millions of other species, are able to live on this planet. It is generated by four components: the atmosphere (the air we breathe); the hydrosphere (the planet’s water); the cryosphere (the ice sheet and glaciers); the biosphere (the planet’s plants and animals). By now, our activities had started to modify every one of these components. Our emissions of CO2 had started to modify our atmosphere. Our increasing water use had started to modify our hydrosphere. Rising atmospheric and sea-surface temperatures had started to modify the cryosphere, most notably in the unexpected shrinking of the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets. Our increasing use of land, for agriculture, cities, roads, mining—as well as all the pollution we were creating—had started to modify our biosphere. Or, to put it another way: We had started to change our climate."

"Sanctimonious slogans have a way of lulling well-meaning people, and at the same time providing self-seekers with means to frustrate the very controls that are most needed. Take, for example, a report entitled, “The Engineer’s Responsibility in Environmental Pollution Control,” submitted in 1971 to the government’s Council of Environmental Quality by the National Industrial Pollution Control Council. The report is an amorphous collection of noble generalities. It conjures up a vision of a crusading army of engineers, thousands abreast, marching in unison. The banner of this army is “cooperation.” Its mission is to “coordinate,” “unify,” “interact,” “centralize efforts,” and “pool resources.” Its weapons are “shared objectives,” “common goals,” “interdisciplinary concepts and techniques.” The cloud of pieties serves, not to enlighten, but to obscure the real truth, which is that environmental pollution control can never be achieved by the worthy sentiments of industrial spokesmen, but only by government regulation."

"When the well's dry, we know the worth of water."

"For a long time, environmental justice was kept separate from the environment at large. It's become "mainstream" only recently, so it just wasn't something the general public–including reporters—really knew about. We see that slowly changing, and we're seeing more environmental reporters become more sophisticated in their understanding of environmental issues and how they impact communities of color. I pursued this because I was, first, interested in racial justice. I knew I wanted to be a reporter that uncovered societal harms right away, but it was only when I realized the severity of the climate crisis that I bridged those two interests together."

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."

"Until recently, economists have not been particularly carried away with concern over environmental problems caused by industrial development. Just as in the other sciences, the few economists ...who have always sounded the alarm ...are somewhat out of the mainstream. These humanist concerns seem to have gone out of style after the age of classical economics. Even the conventional analytical models of contemporary economics seem to prefer to exclude these concepts by ignoring them entirely or by shunting them off into their own branch, called "economic externalities." These externalities include any “given” or windfall factor, such as the availability of transportation, technological know-how, a labor force, or resources, factors that are not themselves directly involved in the economic analysis of markets and businesses. For example, the regularly bright and sunny weather of Hollywood was considered an external economy of the movie industry there. The movie moguls, no matter how tyrannical, could neither turn on nor turn off the sun. But as the surrounding community grew and the smog thickened, the weather became an external economy. In very recent years concern over these economic externalities has grown. The environmentalists are beginning to be included in the mainstream. The literature is growing, and professional meetings include sessions on environmental economics. Attempts are even being made to extend the theoretical framework to include the changes in the environment caused by economic activity. [...] The Materials Flow of the Economy... sees the human race living on a 'space ship earth' in which all the inputs and outputs, all the original resources and all the final wastes, must be accounted for. Furthermore, when the materials are returned in the form of smoke, sewage, garbage, junk, heat, noise, and a wide variety of noxious gases, the world becomes a very changed place — and the change is seldom for the better. Implicit in this materials flow concept of the economy is that the less production that is needed to maintain an adequate level of affluence, the better. An efficient economy is one that gets big results with little effort. More industries, more mines, more businesses, more employment, and more consumer goods do not always mean more well-being... because all these also mean more destruction of our natural resources and despoilation of our surroundings."

"Our way of walking on the Earth has a great influence on animals and plants. We have killed so many animals and plants and destroyed their environments. Many are now extinct. In turn, our environment is now harming us. We are like sleepwalkers, not knowing what we are doing or where we are heading. Whether we can wake up or not depends on whether we can walk mindfully on our Mother Earth. The future of all life, including our own, depends on our mindful steps."

"All life is impermanent. We are all children of the Earth, and, at some time, she will take us back to herself again. We are continually arising from Mother Earth, being nurtured by her, and then returning to her. Like us, plants are born, live for a period of time, and then return to the Earth. When they decompose, they fertilize our gardens. Living vegetables and decomposing vegetables are part of the same reality. Without one, the other cannot be. After six months, compost becomes fresh vegetables again. Plants and the Earth rely on each other. Whether the Earth is fresh, beautiful, and green, or arid and parched depends on the plants. It also depends on us."

"The Industrial Revolution opened up new ways to convert energy to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down tens of thousands of kilometres of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre."

"The Earth has been long denuded and debased by our machines—bled of its mystery by the enlightened scalpel of man—and our blood is the price we must pay for the planet’s resurrection."

"Using science, technology, and cheap energy, we expanded farmlands, chain-sawed forests, exploited fisheries, mined minerals, pumped oil, and flattened mountains for their buried coal. And we did these things in a way that was not remotely sustainable. By harvesting renewable resources faster than they could regrow, by using non-renewable resources that could not be recycled, and by choking environments with industrial wastes, we were borrowing from future generations and from other species."

"Homo sapiens is Earth’s unequivocal champion at gaining and wielding power. We shoot probes to other planets and plumb the depths of the seas. Each year, our species extracts and processes 100 billion tons of natural resources that end up as consumer products and building materials. In order to obtain these resources, we move more soil and rock than are displaced by all of nature’s forces combined—including wind, rivers, rain, volcanoes, and earthquakes. We do so much mining, transporting, manufacturing, and waste dumping that, purely as a side effect, we’re also significantly and perilously altering the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere and oceans. That’s power. Moreover, we have found a multitude of ways to use our outsized human power to subjugate and control one another. We’ve generated so much economic inequality that a mere seven individuals now enjoy as much wealth as the poorer half of humanity—roughly four billion people. At the same time, we’ve developed weapons so lethal that the survival of our species depends on our never using them. We influence one another’s behavior with debt, laws, prisons, taxes, regulations, borders, facial recognition technology, property rights, advertising, hiring and firing, propaganda, internet and social media algorithms, and a thousand other means. Power is good; we can’t do anything without it. But it’s clear that we are creating some serious environmental and social dilemmas for ourselves. Is it possible that we humans, or at least some of us, now enjoy too much of a good thing? Or is our problem merely that we don’t understand power very well, and therefore tend to misuse it?"

"Vertical power worked well for us humans in some ways, increasing our collective power and enabling some of us to enjoy great conveniences. But the costs have been incalculable. Moreover, the inadvertent environmental damage caused by the recent evolution of human physical and social power may be unsurvivable."

"There’s a simple reason we’re seeing so many crises converging in today’s world—including climate change, widespread toxic pollution, resource depletion, skyrocketing inequality, and the disappearance of wild nature. During the past 10,000 years, humanity [has] developed agriculture, a slew of technologies, and, eventually, capitalism. Then, in the last two centuries, we wholeheartedly embraced fossil fuels. These additions to our natural biological powers have put us on a trajectory to overshoot global environmental limits. They also make it possible for a few people to exploit the many in truly diabolical ways. The whole modern techno-social system is unsustainable and it’s bound to crash. We’re seeing plenty of warning signs that the crash is imminent—from worsening trends in planetary boundaries and ecological footprint analyses, to the evaporation of democracy worldwide. At this point, there’s not much we can do, other than acknowledge reality, prepare ourselves psychologically, and adapt as best we can."

"I was wondering why the water looked so clean in front of my house in Bainbridge here..."

"Consider a modern city, the product of the human-generated information used to build the housing, businesses, infrastructure and transportation networks that allow millions to live in close quarters, often with exciting results (both constructive and destructive). All that excitement leads us to ignore the fact that these cities of the industrial age are made possible only through massive expenditures of fossil energy and other resources, some of which come from the other side of the planet. Meanwhile, natural ecosystems are home to a much more expansive variety of creatures living in far more complex relationships, requiring none of that fossil energy to maintain. Natural ecosystems can maintain themselves for countless millennia using only solar flows, while cities draw down millions of years of concentrated energy in a relative blink of an eye."