Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future.
—Charles Lindbergh
If I were a Brazilian without land or money or the means to feed my children, I would be burning the rain forest, too.
—Sting
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
Middle age is when a guy keeps turning off lights for economical rather than romantic reasons.
—Lillian Gordy Carter
The culture has moved to the point where I find myself in the far left without having gone there. I still feel like I'm putting up my father's old Indiana farmer's values. I think I'm a conservative. I don't think these guys that call themselves "conservatives" really are; these guys are high rollers and plungers and bet-the-farm-on-slender-odds guys; they ain't conservatives. I think a conservative is somebody who cares about conserving the planet and the air and the water and the sky and the sun. It is something mean to say that mankind has fucked up the sunshine.
—Stephen Gaskin
The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans.
—Jim Fowler
Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.
—Stewart Udall
Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.
—Aldo Leopold
I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some.
—Herbert Rappaport
The conservation movement is a breeding ground of Communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird-watcher in the country.
—John N. Mitchell,
U.S. attorney general, 1969-1972
If I were to spit upon the revered black stone in Mecca during the height of the annual pilgrimage, I would be slain on the spot by enraged pilgrims for daring to profane the sacred symbol of Islam. An Israeli soldier's bullet in the back would be my deserved fate for scrawling graffiti upon the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.… Life would not be pleasant for me if I took a hammer to the Pietàs in the Vatican, for we humans hold our creations dear, and we deal harshly with those who fail to share our reverence for old stone walls, meteorites, marble statues, icons, and architecture.… Yet each and every day, humans enter the most sacred and reverential cathedrals of the natural world—the redwood forests of northern California or the rain forests of Amazonia—and each and every day we profanely rape these great mysteries with chain saws and bulldozers.
—Paul Watson
It wasn't the Exxon Valdez captain's driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.
—Greenpeace advertisement
Man is a complex being; he makes the deserts bloom and lakes die.
—Gil Stern
If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.
—Susan George