In the near future, despite the development of alternative energy, when you look at the economics and environmental standards, then there's no other source of primary energy in the world than natural gas. Well, perhaps there is nuclear energy but there are also a lot of issues there and there are opponents of nuclear energy. Gas doesn't have those opponents. But there is a country that is, obviously, the world leader in gas reserves. That's our country, the Russian Federation.
On human rights, civil rights and environmental quality, I consider myself to be very liberal. On the management of government, on openness of government, on strengthening individual liberties and local levels of government, I consider myself a conservative. And I don't see that the two attitudes are incompatible.
That whole environment was just incompatible with my beliefs and my personality. It was a dark time for me.
A review of the science suggests that uncertainty is so high as to raise a good prospect that mandatory green house gas reductions will produce little or no environmental benefit.
Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.
While the rich reap most of the benefits of technological development, the poor bear an unequal burden of dealing with the consequences of the resulting increased pollution. The poor continue to live in greatest proximity to the sources of pollution, the infrastructure and machinery of industry. They work in the most polluted and physically dangerous workplaces. And these same individuals, living and working closest to the sources of environmental catastrophe, are also the ones most lacking decent health care.
Planting and growing increasing quantities of trees is the scientific solution to Earth's environmental dilemma.
An individual's harmony with his or her 'own deep self' requires not merely a journey to the interior but a harmonizing with the environmental world.
Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.
Unfortunately, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been especially aggressive in pursuing regulations that specifically target coal power plants. These regulations have already put hundreds of Pennsylvanians out of work and will continue to cause economic distress while yielding negligible benefits for our environment.
The Senegalese conservationist Baba Dioum can summarize: "In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught. "
There are better alternatives,. . . Australia should be exporting its solar technology, not its uranium.
I think we just have to look at all the ways in which we are violating the Earth, each other, economic violence, racial violence, environmental violence - where we are dominating and not cooperating.
The problem is the total opening of borders and allowing the law of the jungle to prevail: The further a company goes today to find slaves, which it then treats like animals and pays a pittance, without regard for environmental laws, the more it earns.
I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book. . . and I began putting more work into environmental history.
Much guilt arises in the life of the believer from practicing the chameleon life of environmental adaptation.
The only way major change in environmental policy is going to happen, the only way, is if there is a very strong, very active popular movement that demands it and such a movement would be unparalleled because it would be a popular movement that says, "Raise our taxes so that we change our behavior. "
The most profound and serious indication of the moral implications underlying the ecological problem is the lack of respect for life evident in many of the patterns of environmental pollution.
Make war not on terrorism but on ignorance, on sickness and on environmental degradation.
Environmental problems provoke challenges about what kind of world we want, how important we think it is if something is brought about by human action or by brute nature, what we think of the value of human life compared to that of other living things.