Voices
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the bible and we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray!' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the bible and they had our land.
- Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu, 1931
For 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
Conservation biology is as much about the interface between theory and practice as it is the science of scarcity and diversity.
- Soule, 1986
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.
- Aldo Leopold
If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.
- Albert Einstein
Man is a complex being; he makes the deserts bloom and lakes die.
- Gil Stern
Poverty is not being able to read and having people write about you.
- Unknown
Today's problems cannot be solved if we still think the way we thought when we created them.
- Albert Einstein
A land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.
- Aldo Leopold
We still think in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself& Now, I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, and I think we're challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.
- Rachel Carson
We have not inherited the world from our forefathers; we have borrowed it from our children.
- Kashmiri proverb
The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired in value.
- Theodore Roosevelt
In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it's unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature.
- Mollie Beattie
To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
- Aldo Leopold, Round River, 1953
Natural species are the library from which genetic engineers can work.
Thomas E. Lovejoy, Time, 13 October 1986
Without knowing it, we utilize hundreds of products each day that owe their origin to wild animals and plants. Indeed our welfare is intimately tied up with the welfare of wildlife. Well may conservationists proclaim that by saving the lives of wild species, we may be saving our own.
Norman Myers, A Wealth of Wild Species, 1983
If we learn, finally, that what we need to 'manage' is not the land so much as ourselves in the land, we will have turned the history of American land-use on its head.
- Gaylord Nelson, Founder of Earth Day
Man shapes himself through the decisions that shape his environment.
- Rene Dubos
We are cutting out our kidneys to enlarge our stomachs.
- Eric Freyfogle, Illinois law professor, on the destruction of wetlands, Baltimore Evening Sun, 12 September 1991
Having to squeeze the last drop of utility out of the land has the same desperate finality as having to chop up the furniture to keep warm.
- Aldo Leopold
Eventually the world will no longer be divided by the ideologies of 'left' and 'right' but by those who accept ecological limits and those who don't.
- Wolfang Sachs
For centuries, thousands of families have depended on the wetland for clean water, fishing, grazing and agricultural land, and the papyrus that they weave into mats, baskets and thatch roofs.
"We worked hard growing maize and bananas, raising cows and bees. I inherited my farm from my father and my forefathers. I have lived here all my life," "One day I saw surveyors taking measurements on my land, then came the bulldozers. They slashed all my crops and they fenced me out of the lake where we used to fish. They built a dam and now the reservoir has submerged all my land, my beasts, my houses.
When I protested to my MP (Member of Parliament), he said I should take the money and move away. I will not take their money. I want my home back."
