George Monbiot
I cannot claim that I've been materially damaged by their loss, any more than the razing of the Prado would deprive me of food or shelter. But the global collapse of biodiversity hurts almost beyond endurance. The sense that the world is greying, its wealth of colour and surprise and wonder fading, is so painful that I can scarcely bear to write about it. Human welfare, as measured by gross domestic product, is doubtless enhanced by the processes which drive extinction. Human welfare, as measured by the heart and the senses, is diminished. We have no use for most of the world's natural exuberance; it cannot be commodified or reproduced. Biodiversity does not belong to us: that is why it is worth preserving.
- George Monbiot: The Naming of Things - 2010
David W. Orr
If today is a typical day on planet earth, humans will add fifteen million tons of carbon to the atmosphere, destroy 115 square miles of tropical rainforest, create seventy-two miles of desert, eliminate between forty to one hundred species, erode seventy-one million tons of topsoil, add twenty-seven hundred tons of CFCs to the stratosphere, and increase their population by 263,000. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
- David Orr: Ecological Literacy,1991
Michael Pollan
Raising animals on old-fashioned mixed farms ... used to make simple
biological sense: You can feed them the waste products of your crops,
and you can feed their waste products to your crops. In fact,
when anumals live on farms the very idea of waste ceases to exist; what
you have instead is a closed ecological loop—what in retrospect you
might call a solution. One of the most striking things that animal
feedlots do (to paraphrase Wendall Berry) is to take this elegant
solution and neatly divide into two new problems: a fertility problem
on the farm (which must be remedied by chemical fertilizers) and a
pollution problem on the feedlot (which is seldom remedied at all).
- Michael Pollan: The Omnivore's Dilemma, 2006
William Nordhaus
Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency lightbulbs, or subsidizing ethanol, or providing research support for solar power—but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon. You should conclude that the proposal is not really serious and does not recognize the central economic message about how to slow climate change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is at best rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic inefficiencies.
- William Nordhaus: A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies
Rachel Carson
"These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are
now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and
homes-nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every
insect, the 'good' and the 'bad,' to still the song of birds and
the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a
deadly film, and to linger on in soil-all this though the intended
target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe
it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface
of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should
not be called 'insecticides,' but 'biocides.'"
- Rachel Carson: Silent Spring, 1962
Edward Abbey
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
- Edward Abbey, The Journey Home, 1977
