54 Environmentalism Quotes

Environmentalism has become more important than ever as we face the challenges of climate change and seek to preserve the Earth's natural beauty for future generations. The wisdom of environmental leaders, thinkers, and activists can serve as a powerful source of inspiration and guidance. In this blog post, you'll discover a curated collection of the top 54 environmentalism quotes that capture the essence of sustainability, conservation, and the undeniable bond between humans and nature. Whether you're an avid environmentalist or just beginning your journey, these quotes are sure to ignite a deeper appreciation for our planet and motivate you to take action.

1. “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world. ” - Rachel Carson

2. “The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.” - Al Gore

3. “There's terrible evil in the world."It comes from men," said Holly. "All other elil do what they have to do and Frith moves them as he moves us. They live on the earth and they need food. Men will never rest till they've spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.” - Richard Adams

4. “They keep saying that sea levels are rising an' all this. It's nowt to do with the icebergs melting, it's because there's too many fish in it. Get rid of some of the fish and the water will drop. Simple. Basic science.” - Karl Pilkington

5. “The obligation to endure gives us the right to know.” - Jean Rostand

6. “Peace is a conscious choice.” - John Denver

7. “To only responsible choice I can make is to be love and happiness." Vincellent"Love the world as you love yourself".Lao Tze"The next step in mans evolution will be the survival of the wisest.” - Deepak Chopra

8. “To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.” - Barbara Kingsolver

9. “Recycling and speed limits are bullshit. They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed.” - Chuck Palahniuk

10. “By planting rye I am creating carbon sinks in my backyard, expanding my role in the carbon cycle, launching my own backyard campaign to offset global warming. My emissions, after all, reflect a rural but very comfortable life in which I enjoy goods that travel great distances - clementines from Spain, wine from California - and on the occasional holiday I fly south, seeking warmer places. Will planting rye in the shoulder seasons be enough to make a difference? Certainly not, but it is a gesture, a way to frame the question and provide a benchmark to judge the extent of my complicity.” - Amy Seidl

11. “Many conscientious environmentalists are repelled by the word "abundance," automatically associating it with irresponsible consumerism and plundering of Earth's resources. In the context of grassroots frustration, insensitive enthusing about the potential for energy abundance usually elicits an annoyed retort. "We have to conserve." The authors believe the human family also has to _choose_. The people we speak with at the recycling depot or organic juice bar are for the most part not looking at the _difference_ between harmony-with-nature technologies and exploitative practices such as mountaintop coal mining. "Destructive" was yesterday's technology of choice. As a result, the words "science and technology" are repugnant to many of the people who passionately care about health, peace, justice and the biosphere. Usually these acquaintances haven't heard about the variety of constructive yet powerful clean energy technologies that have the potential to gradually replace oil and nuclear industries if allowed. Wastewater-into-energy technologies could clean up waterways and other variations solve the problem of polluting feedlots and landfills.” - Jeane Manning

12. “Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.” - Yvon Chouinard

13. “[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.” - Slavoj Žižek

14. “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.” - Bill Maher

15. “I believe that the only way that the human race is gonna survive is to start colonizing space and setting up colonies on the moon, and then space stations.” - Ace Frehley

16. “Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.” - Barbara Kingsolver

17. “Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.” - Lierre Keith

18. “The idea of finding value in what people are willing to pay to get rid of it one of the fundamental backbones of ecocapitalism, as I think of it now.” - Tom Szaky

19. “The Guardian's headline is 'How Going Green May Make You Mean.' We're inclined to think the chain of causation runs the other way—that people who are jerks to begin with gravitate toward verdant sanctimony.” - James Taranto

20. “Humanity's current demand for energy is fundamentally unsustainable. The only feasible choice is to conduct a massive downscaling of all economic, industrial, and political operations. A decentralized, autonomous, and locally-based energy infrastructure is ultimately the only sustainable option.” - Stacy Pettigrew

21. “Let us get of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients thought divine can be found and felt there still.” - Richard Jefferies

22. “We risk losing what nature is if we couch its value in human terms.” - Richard Black

23. “There are many paths leading to a garden and many experiences awaiting those who venture in. No matter what your motive—whether to grow healthy, delicious food; spend time outdoors feeling more alive than your desk job allows; help save the planet; find relaxation, solace, or healing; meet your neighbors; get your hands in the sweet earth; or discover for yourself just how abundant and generous nature can be—a garden rarely disappoints. It’s a magnet for life in all its quirky, beautiful forms.” - Jane Shellenberger

24. “The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment.” - Carl Sagan

25. “Man steps on an ant when he can't catch the fly.” - Bill Gaede

26. “Did I just see you litter?''I'm driving a hybrid. It cancels out.” - Michelle Hodkin

27. “We'll tell him his mother waits for him in heaven, I suppose." "Is that a lie?" "It's what we tell fools and children." She sighed. "Postulating a heaven gives man an out for having been unable to retain the paradise he was given here on earth.” - Sheri S. Tepper

28. “I don't think whole populations are villainous, but Americans are just extraordinarily unaware of all kinds of things. If you live in the middle of that vast continent, with apparently everything your heart could wish for just because you were born there, then why worry? [...] If people lose knowledge, sympathy and understanding of the natural world, they're going to mistreat it and will not ask their politicians to care for it.” - David Attenborough

29. “All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.” - Neal Stephenson

30. “The recognition that human beings are specifically and deliberately responsible for whatever aberrances farm animals may embody, that their discordances reflect our, not their, primary disruption of natural rhythms, and that we owe them more rather than less for having stripped them of their birthright and earthrights has not entered into the environmentalist discussions that I've encountered to date.” - Karen Davis

31. “I have been impressed by the realization that a few men have virtually 'decided' what experiences count and even exist in the world. The language of Western science--the reigning construct of male hegemony--precludes the ability to express the experiential realities it talks about. Virtually all the actual experiences of this world, expressed through the manifest and mysterious characteristics of all the different beings, are unrepresented in the stainless steel edicts of experts. Where is the voice of the voiceless in the scientific literature, including the literature of environmental ethics?” - Karen Davis

32. “Simply because humankind have the power now to meddle or 'manage' or 'exercise stewardship' in every nook and cranny of the world does not mean that we have a right to do so. Even less, the obligation.” - Edward Abbey

33. “A good zoo," Stella said, "is a large domain. A wild cage. A safe place to be. It has room to roam and humans who don't hurt." She pauses, considering her words. "A good zoo is how humans make amends.” - Katherine Applegate

34. “A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.” - Edward Abbey

35. “I think it is far more important to save one square mile of wilderness, anywhere, by any means, than to produce another book on the subject.” - Edward Abbey

36. “Most every charge you level at American capitalism applies with equal force to communism, with this nice difference, that the Reds make no pretense at such frivolities as civil liberties or environmentalism. The differences in degree are so great that they result in a radical difference in kind.” - Edward Abbey

37. “Time and again our best and brightest have alerted society to looming problems, but our persistent pattern has been to ignore the warnings and suffer the consequences. The pathetic refrain of recent years --'Nobody saw this coming'--is always a self-serving lie.” - Eugene Linden

38. “Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today—apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.” - Murray Bookchin

39. “She's a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.” - Peter Heller

40. “In clear-cutting, he said, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls "weed trees," and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. You then dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed-away humus, inject the seedlings with growth-forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellants and raise a uniform crop of trees, all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height (not maturity; that takes too long) you send in a fleet of tree-harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster, tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole.” - Edward Abbey

41. “Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.” - Bill McKibben

42. “Well, sir. I look at facts. And the fact is that our world is dying and if we don't all do our best to save it, we aren't going to last much longer.” - A.J. Lauer

43. “Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.” - David Brin

44. “On the train: staring hypnotized at the blackness outside the window, feeling the incomparable rhythmic language of the wheels, clacking out nursery rhymes, summing up moments of the mind like the chant of a broken record: god is dead, god is dead. going, going, going. and the pure bliss of this, the erotic rocking of the coach. France splits open like a ripe fig in the mind; we are raping the land, we are not stopping.” - Sylvia Plath

45. “No doubt, humans will do a lot of damage before we ultimately destroy ourselves. But life will continue without humans. New forms of intelligence will emerge long after this human experiment is over.” - Zeena Schreck

46. “Modern materialists and religious extremists alike lack the spiritual animistic reverence for non-human beings that every culture once understood as a given.” - Zeena Schreck

47. “It should be noted, as with so many legends and popularly accepted truths created out of political motivation: There, in fact, is no evidence that the hundreds of murders historically attributed to the werewolves of Gévaudan were actually caused by wolves. As with all witchhunts, the endless battle against ignorance requires one to always keep an open mind and sharp wits when considering such rumors - especially the rumors we choose to enjoy.” - Zeena Schreck

48. “Environmentalists and secular humanists insist that humans will destroy the planet. Corporate capitalists and many religious fundamentalists have no regard for wildlife and nature. Ultimately, this dualistic battle is based on false premises. In fact, this planet is more powerful than the human species.” - Zeena Schreck

49. “In California, the state's huge dairy herd produces twenty-seven million tons of manure a year, the particulates and vapors from which have helped to make air quality in the argiculturally intensive San Joaquin Valley worse than it is Los Angeles.” - Paul Roberts

50. “What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead of the ordinary, ahead of what is already known. Art is what pulls on the next age. I’m not saying that my art is that, but that it would be good if it could be.” - Andy Couturier

51. “I thought I should make a place to bring light down into this world. All things that become realities start in that place of someone imagining them.” - Andy Couturier

52. “Time is what we have in this life, and how we use it determines what our life is.” - Andy Couturier

53. “My goal is to draw a line with some 'flavor' to it.” - Andy Couturier

54. “I think all people want freedom, but they've got this idea inserted into their head about money.” - Andy Couturier