Better World Quotes - Forests Quotes

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FORESTS

"Fair Trade supports some of the most bio-diverse farming systems in the world. When you visit a Fair Trade coffee grower's fields, with the forest canopy overhead and the sound of migratory songbirds in the air, it feels like you're standing in the rainforest." -- Professor Miguel Altieri, Leading expert and author on agroecology

The American reading his Sunday paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of the triumph of quantity over quality.... Whole forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality.
~ Irving Babbitt

"If we lived in a desert and our lives depended on a water supply that came out of a steel tube, we would inevitably watch that tube and talk about it understandingly. No citizen would need to be lectured about his duty toward its care and spurred to help if it were in danger. Teachers of civics in such a community might develop a sense of public responsibility, not only by describing the remote beginnings of the commonwealth, but also how that tube got built, how long it would last, how vital the intake might be if the rainfall on the forested mountains nearby ever changed in seasonal habit ot amount. It would be a most unimaginative person, or a stupid one, who could not see the vital relation between the mountains, the forests, that tube and himself."
-- Isaiah Bowman

* Acknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world -- water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution -- if we tackle them with courage and foresight.
~ Jimmy Carter

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.
~ Anton Chekhov

The interminable forests should become graceful parks, for use and delight.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Instead of trying to be responsible for all the problems in the world, we should take on what we love and care about. Then we honor both our inner world and the outer world at the same time. There’s no separation between the two, and there is no hesitation, no self-doubt. This will help us develop great faith that others are taking care of their piece. People who don’t know the details about climate change may care deeply about the forests, the animals, and the children. It is very important that we share, not only our merit, but also the responsibilities. Somehow we have to relieve ourselves of the enormity, which is so debilitating.
~ Paul Hawken

* It doesn't take a genius to pump up the GNP [of a developing country] by burning down rainforests, using slave labor and social repression to keep things in place.
-- Hazel Henderson

"Fairness is an efficiency parameter if we look at the whole global civilization. It is not an efficient way of meeting human needs if one billion people starve while another billion have excess. It would be more efficient to distribute resources so that at least vital needs were met everywhere. Otherwise, for example, if kids are starving somewhere, dad goes out to slash and burn the rain forest to feed them -- and so would I if my kids were dying. And this kind of destruction is everyone's problem, because we live in the same ecosphere."
-- Karl-Henrik Robert

But when you have bad governance, of course, these resources are destroyed: The forests are deforested, there is illegal logging, there is soil erosion. I got pulled deeper and deeper and saw how these issues become linked to governance, to corruption, to dictatorship.
~ Wangari Maathai

So join with me in this campaign. Lend me your strength and your support-and together, we will call America home to the ideals that nourished us in the beginning.
From secrecy, and deception in high places, come home, America...
From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America.
From the entrenchment of special privilege and tax favoritism-
From the waste of idle hands to the joy of useful labor-
From the prejudice of race and sex-
From the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick, come home, America.
Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream.
Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward.
Come home to the belief that we can seek a newer world.
And let us be joyful in the homecoming,
for:' this land is your land, this land is my land.
From California to the New York Islands.
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters.
This land was made for you and me.'
May God grant us the wisdom to cherish this good land and to meet the great challenge that beckons us home. This is the time.
-- George McGovern

* "Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed."
~ J. Sterling Morton, Founder of Arbor Day

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. ~ John Muir

"...Unfortunately, MAN is in the woods, and waste and pure destruction are making rapid headway. If the importance of forests were at all understood, even from an economic standpoint, their preservation would call forth the most watchful attention of government." ~ John Muir

* "The battle we have fought, and are still fighting for the forests is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong, and we cannot expect to see the end of it ... So we must count on watching and striving for these trees, and should always be glad to find anything so surely good and noble to strive for."
~ John Muir

Federal policy over the past century has largely failed to promote an energy system based on safe, secure, economically affordable, and environmentally benign energy sources. The tax code, budget appropriations, and regulatory processes overwhelmingly have been used to subsidize dependence on fossil fuels and nuclear power. The result: increased sickness and premature deaths, depleted family budgets, acid rain destruction of lakes, forests, and crops, oil spill contamination, polluted rivers and loss of aquatic species and the long-term peril of climate change and radioactive waste dumps–not to mention a dependency on external energy supplies.
~ Ralph Nader

The forest is not a resource for us, it is life itself. It is the only place for us to live. -- Evaristo Nugkuag Ikanan

Sleeping in the Forest
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts,
her pockets full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before,
a stone on the riverbed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts,
and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me,
the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom.
By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

-- Mary Oliver

"What may be possible for a minority of humankind, albeit at great cost, simply cannot work for the humankind. Our kind of progress depends on lacerating the Earth, on gouging out its riches, on stripping is life-sustaining skin of soil and forest, on poisoning its pure air, on defecating copiously in its pure water... the single most important indicator of environmental decline is the extent to which the damage done is reversible. The most heinous ecological crime of all is for any one generation so seriously to assault the web of life that the damage done is literally irreversible for every generation that follows."
~ Jonathon Porritt

"We must protect the forests for our children, grandchildren and children yet to be born. We must protect the forests for those who can't speak for themselves such as the birds, animals, fish and trees."
-- Qwatsinas (Hereditary Chief Edward Moody), Nuxalk Nation

* "A nation that destroys it's soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people."
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

If there is any one duty which more than another we owe it to our children and our children's children to perform at once, it is to save the forests of this country, for they constitute the first and most important element in the conservation of the natural resources of this country.
-- Theodore Roosevelt

--It's time we stopped turning up our noses at the nation's garbage dumps and started appreciating them for what they really are -- the municipal mines, forests, oil wells and energy sources of the future!
-- Max Spendlove

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.
~Wallace Stegner