Pollution Quotes - Page 17

• Poor communities, frequently communities of color but not exclusively, suffer disproportionately. If you look at where our industrialized facilities tend to be located, they're not in the upper middle class neighborhoods.

  Carol Browner

  Color, Class, Community

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• How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry-between say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off." Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.

  Wendell Berry

  War, Differences, Risk

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• Another agricultural trend of growing concern is the increased nutrient content of coastal waters resulting from fertilizer runoff in agricultural regions. Augmented by urban sewage discharge in some situations, this results in huge algal blooms, which, as they die and decay, deplete the oxygen content in the water, leading to the death of the fish.

  Lester R. Brown

  Oxygen, Water, Environmental

  Lester R. Brown, Michael Renner (2014). “Vital Signs 1999-2000: The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future”, p.25, Routledge

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• Each summer, for example, nitrogen and phosphate washing from farmlands in the Mississippi Valley enter the Gulf of Mexico, creating a massive algal bloom covering some 16,000 square kilometers. As the blooms die off, this area-roughly the size of New Jersey-is so deprived of oxygen that no fish survive.

  Lester R. Brown

  Summer, Squares, Oxygen

  Lester R. Brown, Michael Renner (2014). “Vital Signs 1999-2000: The Environmental Trends That Are Shaping Our Future”, p.25, Routledge

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• Anyone who studies our poisonous drugs, our denatured food, our deathtrap automobiles and houses, our lung-rotting cities, must concede that we accept a good deal of murder as inevitable simply because it is done to make or save money.

  Joy Davidman

  Cities, House, Drug

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• Who gets the risks? The risks are given to the consumer, the unsuspecting consumer and the poor work force. And who gets the benefits? The benefits are only for the corporations, for the money makers.

  Cesar Chavez

  Risk, Environmental, Benefits

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• It is essential that we take steps to prevent chemical substances from becoming environmental hazards. Unless we develop better methods to assure adequate testing of chemicals, we will be inviting the environmental crisis of the future.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Environmental, Essentials, Hazards

  Nixon, Richard M. (1972). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard M. Nixon, 1971”, p.132, Best Books on

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• Brothers and Sisters: Our ancient homeland is spotted today with an array of chemical dumps. Along the Niagara River, dioxin, a particularly deadly substance, threatens the remaining life there and in the waters which flow from there. Forestry departments spray the surviving forests with powerful insecticides to encourage tourism by people seeking a few days or weeks away from the cities where the air hangs heavy with sulphur and carbon oxides.

  Winona LaDuke

  Brother, Powerful, Air

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• I did a filmstrip on pollution in the Davison area as my Eagle Scout project and showed it around town. Businesses who were the polluters were mad at me.

  Michael Moore

  Eagles, Mad, Towns

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• By 1990, the EPA had tallied up 32,645 sites of past chemical waste dumping in need of cleanup. Some of these are actual waste landfills, but many are former manufacturing sites where drums full of chemicals have been simply abandoned. The names of the most notorious appear on the EPS's National Priorities List. These are the so-called Superfund sites, names for the super fund of money put together by Congress in 1980 to clean them up. In 2009, the Superfund list contained 1,331 sites.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Past, Names, Priorities

  Sandra Steingraber (2010). “Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment”, p.69, Da Capo Press

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• The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures.

  Winona LaDuke

  Animal, Lakes, Land

  Winona LaDuke (1999). “All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life”, p.17, South End Press

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• As currently written, the laws require certain manufacturers and users of such chemicals to report any and all environmental releases-either accidental or routine-to air, water, or soil. The Toxics Release Inventory is the main registry of such events, and it is available to the public through the Environmental Protection Agency. It is hardly comprehensive. Toxic emissions reported to the federal government are thought to account for only 5 percent of all chemical releases.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Agency, Government, Air

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• Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

  Hubert H. Humphrey

  Society, Affluence, Affluent

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• Despite Arizona's remarkable growth in recent years, we have met the current federal health standards for ozone pollution and the Environmental Protection Agency recently approved our dust control plan.

  Jane D. Hull

  Ozone, Agency, Dust

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• Indeed, the quantity of PCBs still in use plus the quantity still languishing in waste dumps exceeds the total amount that has already escaped into the general environment. Without a program to recall and contain them, semivolatile PCBs will continue to insinuate themselves into the food chain for decades.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Environmental, Use, Waste

  Sandra Steingraber (2012). “Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood”, p.136, Da Capo Press

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• Your grandchildren will likely find it incredible - or even sinful - that you burned up a gallon of gasoline to fetch a pack of cigarettes!

  Paul MacCready

  Grandchildren, Environmental, Society

  "Paul MacCready Interview: Toward A Rational Use of Energy". Interview With Richard Freudenberger, www.motherearthnews.com. September/October 1981.

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• We have the industrial agriculturalists who try and make an argument that big is beautiful. But if you do the math, and particularly if you factor in that the price of oil is going to go through the roof, and so the price of transportation is going to go through the roof - making it abundantly clear that it's out of whack. The efficiency arguments are already crumbling, particularly if you actually include the cost of food pollution that these industries cause. They are tremendously unsustainable and tremendously inefficient.

  Raj Patel

  Beautiful, Math, Trying

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• There are many who still do not believe that global warming is a problem at all. And it's no wonder: because they are the targets of a massive and well-organized campaign of disinformation lavishly funded by polluters who are determined to prevent any action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming out of a fear that their profits might be affected if they had to stop dumping so much pollution into the atmosphere.

  Al Gore

  Determination, Believe, Atmosphere

  Al Gore (2017). “The Assault on Reason: Our Information Ecosystem, from the Age of Print to the Era of Trump”, p.296, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the west... keeping the world in chains. If [our nation] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Environmental, India, World

  Mahatma Gandhi (1965). “My Picture of Free India”

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• Already, viral contamination offers an initial response to the question of the downside of electronic circuits, but another area of research beckons the area of ecological pollution. The pollution not only of air, water, and other substances, but also the unperceived pollution of distances.

  Paul Virilio

  Distance, Air, Water

  Paul Virilio (1997). “Open Sky”, p.40, Verso

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• No magic bullet, not even the Internet, can save us from population explosion, deforestation, climate disruption, poison by pollution, and wholesale extinction of plant and animal species. We are going to have to want different things, seek different pleasures, pursue different goals than those that have been driving us and our global economy.

  Joanna Macy

  Animal, Goal, Magic

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• Environmentally, business in America in 1970 was very similar to business in China today. Even if a CEO wanted to be a responsible corporate citizen, he (and they were all "he's" then) simply couldn't invest a billion dollars in pollution controls to produce a product that was indistinguishable from those of his competitors. His products would be priced out of the market. Passing laws that created a clean, level playing field for whole industries had to be a core focus of the 1970s.

  Denis Hayes

  Law, Pollution Control, America

  "The Rumpus Interview with Earth Day organiser Denis Hayes". Interview with Melissa Price, therumpus.net. April 22, 2009.

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• Air pollution is my biggest concern right now. Maybe because I live in Beijing, and in this city we have such severe challenges due to bad air quality. It has affected our daily lives and health. I do not go outdoors because of it. I desperately hope that we can improve the current situation.

  Li Bingbing

  Air, Cities, Challenges

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• Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution.

  Allen Hershkowitz

  Age, Generations, Looks

  "American taste for soft toilet roll 'worse than driving Hummers'" by Suzanne Goldenberg, www.theguardian.com. February 26, 2009.

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• I get goose-bumps when you talk about Diane Wilson. Who knows where she found that courage? When she was a child, she would crawl under the bed when a stranger came to the house. But in 1989, she found out that her county in south Texas was ranked worst in the country for toxic waste. She wondered if the effluent, dumped into the waters where she and her family had shrimped for generations, might be responsible for the dwindling fish populations. And she suspected that her son's autism might be related to the pollution.

  Frances Moore Lappé

  Country, Children, Son

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

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