This post contains 151 environmental quotes from great conservationists, naturalists and environmental activists like Al Gore, John Muir, John James Audubon, Gaylord Nelson and many more. These quotes have been taken from various sources on the internet. If you have any of your favorite environmental quote that we missed and you would like it to be included here, please send it to us through our contact us page.
Lets nurture the nature, so that we can have a better future.
~Anonymous
Environment
A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.
– John James Audubon
Keep close to Nature’s heart… and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean.
– John Muir
I feel more confident than ever that the power to save the planet rests with the individual consumer.
– Denis Hayes
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s needs, but not every man’s greed.
– Mahatma Gandhi
The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.
– Richard Rogers
The environment is where we all meet; where all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share.
– Lady Bird Johnson
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
Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.
– William Ruckelshaus
What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.
– Chris Maser
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
– Albert Einstein
The sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away.
– Stephanie Mills
It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.
– David Attenborough
The ultimate test of man’s conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard.
– Gaylord Nelson
Man is still the greatest miracle and the greatest problem on this earth.
– David Sarnoff
Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.
– Cree Indian Proverb
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
– Aldo Leopold
The best friend of earth of man is the tree. When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources on the earth.
– Frank Lloyd Wright
A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
When we realize we can make a buck cleaning up the environment, it will be done!
– Dennis Weaver
Where the quality of life goes down for the environment, the quality of life goes down for humans.
– George Holland
The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done — challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.
– Jean Houston
It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.
– Ansel Adams
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
The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.
– Marya Mannes
He that plants trees loves others beside himself.
– Thomas Fuller
The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
– Ralph Nader
The Earth has a skin and that skin has diseases, one of its diseases is called man.
– Friedrich Nietzsche Philosopher
For 200 years we’ve been conquering nature. Now we’re beating it to death.
– Tom McMillan
The wealth of the nation is its air, water, soil, forests, minerals, rivers, lakes, oceans, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats and biodiversity… that’s all there is. That’s the whole economy. That’s where all the economic activity and jobs come from. These biological systems are the sustaining wealth of the world.
– Gaylord Nelson
Whe one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
– John Muir
The race is now on between the technoscientific and scientific forces that are destroying the living environment and those that can be harnessed to save it. . . . If the race is won, humanity can emerge in far better condition than when it entered, and with most of the diversity of life still intact.”
– Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life
Global Warming
The warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences.
– Al Gore
Global warming is no longer a philosophical threat, no longer a future threat, no longer a threat at all. It’s our reality.
-Bill McKibben
Global warming threatens our health, our economy, our natural resources, and our children’s future. It is clear we must act.
– Eliot Spitzer
Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.
-Dan Lipinski
Global warming is too serious for the world any longer to ignore its danger or split into opposing factions on it.
– Tony Blair
People tend to focus on the here and now. The problem is that, once global warming is something that most people can feel in the course of their daily lives, it will be too late to prevent much larger, potentially catastrophic changes.
– Elizabeth Kolbert
Global warming is real – it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world.
– Bjorn Lomborg
The most important thing about global warming is this. Whether humans are responsible for the bulk of climate change is going to be left to the scientists, but it’s all of our responsibility to leave this planet in better shape for the future generations than we found it.
– Mike Huckabee
Global warming is indeed a scam, perpetrated by scientists with vested interests, but in need of crash courses in geology, logic and the philosophy of science.
– Martin Keeley
Some of the scientists, I believe, haven’t they been changing their opinion a little bit on global warming? There’s a lot of differing opinions and before we react I think it’s best to have the full accounting, full understanding of what’s taking place.
– George W. Bush
The good news is, we have everything we need now to respond to the challenge of global warming. We have all the technologies we need, more are being developed…. But we should not wait, we cannot wait, we must not wait.
– Al Gore
Global warming is controversial, of course, but the controversy is mainly over whether human activity is driving it.
– Michio Kaku
Today, we can see with our own eyes what global warming is doing. In that context it becomes truly irresponsible, if not immoral, for us not to do something.
– Joe Lieberman
It is upsetting that many people don’t seem to observe what’s happening to the environment, what’s happening in terms of global warming, the loss of habitats and wild things.
-Joanne Woodward
Climate Change
As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.
– Al Gore
The clear and present danger of climate change means we cannot burn our way to prosperity. We already rely too heavily on fossil fuels. We need to find a new, sustainable path to the future we want. We need a clean industrial revolution.
– Ban Ki-moon
The shift to a cleaner energy economy wont happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way. But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.
– Barack Obama
One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won’t jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.
– Jeff Goodell
One could have the mistaken impression that the entirety of climate science is based upon a single correlation study.
– Karl Braganza
Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally.
– George Monbiot
If you want to know the scientific consensus on global warming, read the reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But if you want to know what the consensus will be ten years from now, read Jim Hansen’s work.
– Chuck Kutscher
Yes, climate science is uncertain. However, it’s certain enough to warrant action. You don’t need to have the seventh decimal place filled in to see that the number isn’t looking good.
– Brian D.
If we do not change our negative habits toward climate change, we can count on worldwide disruptions in food production, resulting in mass migration, refugee crises and increased conflict over scarce natural resources like water and farm land. This is a recipe for major security problems.
– Michael Franti
So anyone who says that we shouldn’t act on climate change because of uncertainty is really inviting you to ride towards a brick wall at 80 km/h because it might not hurt.
Are you feeling lucky?
– Stephan Lewandowsky
By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited… The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.
– Bill Gates
Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us.
– Bill Nye
Climate change is destroying our path to sustainability. Ours is a world of looming challenges and increasingly limited resources. Sustainable development offers the best chance to adjust our course.
– Ban Ki-moon
Doing all we can to combat climate change comes with numerous benefits, from reducing pollution and associated health care costs to strengthening and diversifying the economy by shifting to renewable energy, among other measures.
– David Suzuki
On climate change, we often don’t fully appreciate that it is a problem. We think it is a problem waiting to happen.
– Kofi Annan
Climate change is a global problem. The planet is warming because of the growing level of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. If this trend continues, truly catastrophic consequences are likely to ensue from rising sea levels, to reduced water availability, to more heat waves and fires.
– Malcolm Turnbull
Climate change is real. Climate change is being substantially increased by humans and the carbon we put into the atmosphere. And it appears to be speeding up. If science has made any mistakes, science has been underestimating it.
– James Balog
The problem of climate change is so large that it can’t be solved by voluntary individual responses. It requires an economy-wide solution, i.e. one that limits the total carbon intake of the economy.
-Peter Barnes
Pollution
Today we’re dumping 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the environment, and tomorrow we will dump more, and there is no effective worldwide response. Until we start sharply reducing global-warming pollution, I will feel that I have failed.
– Al Gore
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
– Jacques-Yves Cousteau
In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities, the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day.
– Lester Brown
That we have children coming into this world already polluted, at the same time we don’t know what the effects of that pollution will be on their mental and physical development, is both bad policy and immorally wrong.
– Louise Slaughter
Perhaps we should address fact of man-made pollution instead of focus on the theory of man-made global warming.
– Russell Eric Dobda
The oceans are in trouble; the coasts are in trouble; our marine resources are in trouble. These are not challenges we can sweep aside.
– James Watkins
The environmental effects of the automobile are well known: motor vehicles cause, for example, as much as 75 percent of the noise and 80 percent of the air pollution in our cities, and the industry must face mounting pressure from environmentalists.
– Stewart Udall
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.
– R. Buckminster Fuller
We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.
– Gunther Grass
There’s so much pollution in the air now that if it weren’t for our lungs there’d be no place to put it all.
– Robert Orben
Renewable Energy
Renewable energy also creates more jobs than other sources of energy – most of these will be created in the struggling manufacturing sector, which will pioneer the new energy future by investment that allows manufacturers to retool and adopt new technologies and methods.
– Jay Inslee
To truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.
– Barack Obama
Once the renewable infrastructure is built, the fuel is free forever. Unlike carbon-based fuels, the wind and the sun and the earth itself provide fuel that is free, in amounts that are effectively limitless.
– Al Gore
It is time for a sustainable energy policy which puts consumers, the environment, human health, and peace first.
– Dennis Kucinich
Solar is cost effective right now. When you consider the cost to our health from air pollution, solar is just as competitive as any other energy source.
– Thomas P. Kay
We need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil by ending the subsidies for oil companies, and doubling down on clean energy that generates jobs and strengthens our security.
– Barack Obama
The relationship between renewable energy sources and the communities we expect to host them must be appropriate and sustainable and, above all, acceptable to local people.
– Owen Paterson
By encouraging renewable energy sources such as wind energy, we boost South Dakota’s economy and we help reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil.
– Tim Johnson
We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can’t stand windmills at any price.
– James Lovelock
There is an incredible renewable energy resource off both coasts of this country – wind and tidal energy that can power our economy, create good paying jobs and reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
– Chellie Pingree
The future is green energy, sustainability, renewable energy.
– Arnold Schwarzenegger
I think the cost of energy will come down when we make this transition to renewable energy.
– Al Gore
We need to invest dramatically in green energy, making solar panels so cheap that everybody wants them. Nobody wanted to buy a computer in 1950, but once they got cheap, everyone bought them.
– Bjorn Lomborg
The planet Earth, though not threatened with destruction by man-made global warming, is by no means indestructible. There are many unpredictable events within our solar system, and still more outside it, that could make Earth uninhabitable by humans.
– Paul Johnson
Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it’s filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas.
– Jeff Goodell
Homeowners want solar power. It’s cost-effective. We invented a business model that makes it really easy for consumers to switch to solar – and that’s solar-as-a-service.
– Lynn Jurich
Studies show that investments to spur renewable energy and boost energy efficiency generate far more jobs than oil and coal.
– Jeff Goodell
Clearly, we need more incentives to quickly increase the use of wind and solar power; they will cut costs, increase our energy independence and our national security and reduce the consequences of global warming.
– Hillary Rodham Clinton
We feel strongly that industrial wind is a false solution to climate change, and remain committed to defending Maine’s mountain forests as a carbon-sink and as habitat for rare and endangered species.
– Jessie Dowling
Rely on renewable energy flows that are always there whether we use them or not, such as, sun, wind and vegetation: on energy income, not depletable energy capital.
– Amory Lovins
Breaking America’s oil addiction would not lead to a future of sackcloth and ashes.
– Colman McCarthy
I see this [biodiesel] as a way for the farmer to grow fuel and food and put him back in business again.
– Willie Nelson
I believe that the U.S. can and should be a global leader in the development of alternative energy sources…
– Barack Obama
The wind farm business is an immense folly inflicted on a gullible public by big business, with the collusion of big government, at enormous expense to taxpayers and the environment, with shockingly little energy benefit.
– Christopher Barnes
Really, if it weren’t wind, the environmental groups would be out there screaming their heads off about the destruction that’s going on.
– Stephanie Kaplan
The word “energy” incidentally equates with the Greek word for “challenge.” I think there is much to learn in thinking of our federal energy problem in that light. Further, it is important for us to think of energy in terms of a gift of life.
– Thomas Carr
We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.
– Jimmy Carter
Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of … permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.
– Jimmy Carter
The risks of transporting deadly nuclear waste, the environmental justice impacts and the long-term health effects of both these projects are untenable…We cannot afford to be silent on these important issues.
– James Cromwell
The way to bring gas prices down is to end our dependence on oil and use the renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per gallon gasoline.
– Al Gore
It’s very important that we expand our use of clean energy and make a long-term commitment to it.
– Julia Roberts
The Age of Oil has really exhausted its usefulness, and it has actually become a danger to our lives and our ability to survive on the planet.
– Dennis Weaver
Energy Policy will be and should be driven by environmental policy in the future.”
– Timothy Wirth
Energy conservation is the foundation of energy independence.
– Thomas H. Allen
The two most abundant forms of power on earth are solar and wind, and they’re getting cheaper and cheaper…
– Ed Begley, Jr.
Biofuels are the future of energy in this nation and around the world
– Rod Blagojevich
The climate challenge illustrates how we have to change. The developing countries need more support and opportunities to develop and use clean energy. Because if the current situation continues, then the world will not be able to handle this burden.
– Gro Harlem Brundtland
Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.
– Carl Sagan
We can create a more sustainable, cleaner and safer world by making wiser energy choices.
– Robert Alan Silverstein
Fossil Fuels
Both the United States and the world economy have already reached – and surpassed – their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.
– Donella Meadows
Since 1850, burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas has increased 100 times to produce energy as the world has industrialized to serve the world’s more than 6 billion and growing population.
– John Olver
The dinosaurs died so that chat rooms may flourish.
– Tom Robbins
Fracking ensures that the age of oil-and it’s princely hydrocarbon cousin, the natural gas molecule-will not end because we have run out of fossil fuels. But it may end because burning these wonderful fuels puts the planet farther down a path we don’t want to head down.
– Russell Gold
The truth is, as most of us know, that global warming is real and humans are major contributors, mainly because we wastefully burn fossil fuels.
– David Suzuki
We should not be drilling for oil anywhere because burning oil and coal and natural gas is what’s destroying our environment, our climate. And we need the climate if we’re going to eat.
-Paul Ehrlich
The atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising – mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels. It’s agreed that this build-up will, in itself, induce a long-term warming trend, superimposed on all the other complicated effects that make climate fluctuate.
– Martin Rees
Just as fossil fuels from conventional sources are finite and are becoming depleted, those from difficult sources will also run out. If we put all our energy and resources into continued fossil fuel extraction, we will have lost an opportunity to have invested in renewable energy.
– David Suzuki
Fire made us human, fossil fuels made us modern, but now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable.
– Amory Lovins
What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.
– James Hansen
It’s going to cost trillions of dollars to rework the energy sources all over the world. Were going to have to move away from fossil fuels.
– Ted Turner
There is an urgent need to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, dramatically reduce wasted energy, and significantly shift our power supplies from oil, coal, and natural gas to wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable energy sources.
– Bill McKibben
The high prices also highlight the fact that the U.S. is too heavily dependent on fossil fuels that we import from unstable parts of the world. To protect our national security, we must become more energy secure.
– Dan Lipinski
By burning fossil fuels, we are already dumping 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, which has a profound effect on the climate. So, like it or not, we’re already messing with a system we don’t understand.
– Jeff Goodell
Recycling
I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use.
– Mother Teresa
It’s all about fair trade, and helping people eating locally grown stuff. We’re recycling everything. We’re trying to tour in the most conscious way possible, environmentally and socially.
– Andrew Dost
We can help educate our families and communities about the importance of recycling for our environment, and how each of us can make a difference for a better world by recycling.
– Robert Alan Silverstein
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
– Wendell Berry
Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem.
– Barry Commoner
We live in a disposable society. It’s easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name – we call it recycling.
– Neil LaBute
Listen up, you couch potatoes: each recycled beer can saves enough electricity to run a television for three hours.
– Denis Hayes
If you want grown-ups to recycle, just tell their kids the importance of recycling, and they’ll be all over it.
– Bill Nye
Years ago, we all talked about recycling and not dumping things down your drain and all of that, but talking doesn’t help much. Basically, it’s going to have to be legislation because the impact is so huge and diversified.
– Ted Danson
We can help educate our families and communities about the importance of recycling for our environment, and how each of us can make a difference for a better world by recycling.
– Robert Alan Silverstein
Sustainability
Sustainability requires maintaining life-supporting natural capital in order for our socioeconomic goals to be met.
– Warren Flint
The most sustainable way is to not make things. The second most sustainable way is to make something very useful, to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved.
– Thomas Sigsgaard
Sustainability can’t be like some sort of a moral sacrifice or political dilemma or a philanthropical cause. It has to be a design challenge.
– Bjarke Ingels
Sustainability, ensuring the future of life on Earth, is an infinite game, the endless expression of generosity on behalf of all.
– Paul Hawken
People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.
– Ha-Joon Chang
All the human and animal manure which the world wastes, if returned to the land, instead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish the world.
– Victor Hugo
Sustainability is a seemingly laudable goal – it tells us we need to live within our means, whether economic, ecological, or political – but it’s insufficient for uncertain times. How can we live within our means when those very means can change, swiftly and unexpectedly, beneath us?
– Jamais Cascio
When sustainability is viewed as being a matter of survival for your business, I believe you can create massive change.
– Cameron Sinclair
Japan is already a leader in energy efficiency, and it has a wealth of innovative technologies. We must put this expertise to use creating a model for growth and sustainability that we can share with the world.
– Yoshihiko Noda
As sustainability becomes more and more of a concern, we’re going to see more plastics.
– Greg Lynn
Sustainability includes how you run your business, and my bottom line includes how you treat your people. Sustainability starts with your staff.
– Tom Douglas
I actually believe ‘Sustainability’, as a concept, is one of the arteries leading to the heart of so many of our cultural transitions at play today. And it’s this concept which leads me to bottled water, and its multi-billion dollar industry.
– Brandon Boyd
Reducing our levels of consumption will not be a sacrifice but a bonus if we simply redefine the meaning of the word ‘success’.
– David Wann
He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
[Sustainability is] growth based on forms and processes of development that do not undermine the integrity of the environment on which they depend.
– Jim MacNeill
References
