Environmental Degradation Quotes

• In Kenya women are the first victims of environmental degradation, because they are the ones who walk for hours looking for water, who fetch firewood, who provide food for their families.

  Wangari Maathai

  Water, Environmental, Degradation

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• There can be no peace as long as there is grinding poverty, social injustice, inequality, oppression, environmental degradation, and as long as the weak and small continue to be trodden by the mighty and powerful.

  Dalai Lama

  Powerful, Long, Environmental

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• Environmental degradation is one of the biggest challenges we have. I think a question that we're not asking ourselves is: 'Isn't humanity committing suicide with this indiscriminate and tyrannical use of nature?'

  Pope Francis

  Suicide, Happy Life, Thinking

  "12* Powerful Climate Allies That GOP Denier Leaders Can’t Ignore" by Amanda Hanley, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 18, 2014.

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• I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?

  Robert Redford

  Nature, Thinking, Earth Day

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

  Kofi Annan

  Effort, Environmental, Degradation

  "In larger freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all". Report for the United Nations sixtieth anniversary summit, 2005.

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• The only truly dependable production technologies are those that are sustainable over the long term. By that very definition, they must avoid erosion, pollution, environmental degradation, and resource waste. Any rational food-production system will emphasize the well-being of the soil-air-water biosphere, the creatures which inhabit it, and the human beings who depend upon it.

  Eliot Coleman

  Technology, Garden, Erosion

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• Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Meaningful, Creativity, Challenges

  FaceBook post by Muhammad Yunus from Oct 11, 2012

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• Environmental degradation, overpopulation, refugees, narcotics, terrorism, world crime movements, and organized crime are worldwide problems that don't stop at a nation's borders.

  Warren Christopher

  Environmental, Collaboration, Borders

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• Well, for starters, we have to do more to create demand for new technologies that can reduce our dependence on foreign oil and environmental degradation.

  Sherwood Boehlert

  Technology, Aggravation, Oil

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• Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  War, Ignorance, Environmental

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• What the new fertilizer technology has accomplished for the farmer is clear: more crop can be produced on less acreage than before. Since the cost of fertilizer, relative to the resultant gain in crop sales, is lower than that of any other economic input, and since the Land Bank pays the farmer for acreage not in crops, the new technology pays him well. The cost-in environmental degradation-is borne by his neighbors in town who find their water polluted. The new technology is an economic success-but only because it is an ecological failure.

  Barry Commoner

  Technology, Land, Water

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• consumption can be very harmful to the world. I'm not a big proponent of the idea that consumption makes you morally bad, but there are consequences to our acts, and those consequences are environmental degradation and the huge social inequalities that make our standard of living in the United States possible.

  Judith Levine

  Ideas, Environmental, Degradation

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• Instead, we have found ourselves gasping for air in a sea of corruption, dysfunction, environmental degradation, waste, disenchantment and inequality—and the harder we compete, the more unequal we become.

  Margaret Heffernan

  Sea, Dysfunction, Air

  Margaret Heffernan (2014). “A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition”, p.13, PublicAffairs

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• Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It's wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.

  Anthony Doerr

  Beautiful, Mean, Hands

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• Muslims have been an almost entirely benevolent force in the 20th century. They did not wreak the havoc the Western powers wreaked on the world. They have not come anywhere near to the environmental degradation that we've done to the planet. So I think Muslims need to be seen in the proper light. They're mostly decent, hardworking people, people with deep family values, and they want to live in peace.

  Hamza Yusuf

  Thinking, Light, People

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Peace should be understood in a human way - in a broad social, political and economic way. Peace is threatened by unjust economic, social and political order, absence of democracy, environmental degradation and absence of human rights.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Rights, Order, Political

  Muhammad Yunus (2007). “Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism”, p.229, Hachette UK

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• We know what we have to do. And we know how to do it. If we fail to convert our self-destructing economy into one that is environmentally sustainable, future generations will be overwhelmed by environmental degradation and social disintegration. Simply stated, if our generation does not turn things around, our children may not have the option of doing so.

  Lester R. Brown

  Children, Our Generation, Self

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• We now see numerous examples of brands working together to address issues such as environmental degradations, climate control, pollution, poverty and disease.

  Simon Mainwaring

  Issues, Working Together, Environmental

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• In an age of interdependence, global citizenship - based on trust and sense of shared responsibility - is a crucial pillar of progress. At a time when more than one billion people are denied the very minimum requirements of human dignity, business cannot afford to be seen as the problem. Rather, it must work with governments and all other actors in society to mobilize global science, technology and knowledge to tackle the interlocking crises of hunger, disease, environmental degradation and conflict that are holding back the developing world.

  Kofi Annan

  Responsibility, Technology, Government

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• A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency - issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights - the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

  Gregory S. Paul

  Religious, Atheist, Children

  "Why do Americans still dislike atheists?". www.washingtonpost.com. April 29, 2011.

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• We have a situation where we are rich really as a world overall, and yet we have the capacity to destroy ourselves, either through nuclear weapons or through environmental degradation, and we allow the life chances of hundreds of millions of people to be destroyed because we haven't found the will to tackle it

  Tony Blair

  Future, People, Vision

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• The women of the Green Belt Movement have learned about the causes and the symptoms of environmental degradation. They have begun to appreciate that they, rather than their government, ought to be the custodians of the environment.

  Wangari Maathai

  Government, Appreciate, Environmental

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• It's clear that agriculture, done right, is the best means the world has today to simultaneously tackle food security, poverty and environmental degradation.

  Irene Rosenfeld

  Mean, Agriculture, Environmental

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• The essential role of the environment is still marginal in discussions about poverty. While we continue to debate these initiatives, environmental degradation, including the loss of biodiversity and topsoil, accelerates, causing development efforts to falter.

  Wangari Maathai

  Loss, Effort, Environmental

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• The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

  Derrick Jensen

  Environmental, Degradation, Economy

  Derrick Jensen (2006). “Endgame”, p.195, Seven Stories Press

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