#environment

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it. ↗

— Willa Cather

#environment #native-american #death

Ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure...it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an "acceptable" rate. ↗

— William McDonough

#industry #regulations #death

Without international participation, jobs and emissions will simply shift overseas to countries that require few, if any, environmental protections, harming the global environment as well as the U.S. economy. ↗

— Fred Upton

#countries #economy #emissions #environment #environmental

Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us. ↗

— Bill Nye

#change #climate #climate change #environmental #environmental issue

Even viewed conservatively, trees are worth far more than they cost to plant and maintain. The U.S. Forest Service's Center for Urban Forest Research found a ten-degree difference between the cool of a shaded park in Tucson and the open Sonoran desert. A tree planted in the right place, the center estimates, reduces the demand for air conditioning and can save 100 kilowatt hours in annual electrical use, about 2 to 8 percent of total use. Strategically planted trees can also shelter homes from wind, and in cold weather they can reduce heating fuel costs by 10 to 12 percent. A million strategically planted trees, the center figures, can save $10 million in energy costs. And trees increase property values, as much as 1 percent for each mature tree. These savings are offset somewhat by the cost of planting and maintaining trees, but on balance, if we had to pay for the services that trees provide, we couldn't afford them. Because trees offer their services in silence, and for free, we take them for granted. ↗

— Jim Robbins

#environment #trees #home

Environmentalists generally object to battery-powered devices and for good reason: batteries require mined minerals, employ manufacturing processes that leak toxins into local ecosystems and leave behind an even-worse trail of side effects upon disposal. Though when it comes to the largest mass-produced battery-powered gadget ever created—the electric car—environmentalists cannot jump from their seats fast enough to applaud it. ↗

— Ozzie Zehner

#environment #humor #politics #humor

I had been to New Mexico many times. I loved it. It's a very exotic, interesting, severely crazy environment. I don't know if I could live there all year. It's such an intense place. ↗

— Campbell Scott

#could #crazy #environment #exotic #had

If we surrendered to earth's intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#nature #intelligence

We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#exploration #explore #land #mysterious #mystery

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#nature #wilderness #nature