Jonas Salk Quotes

We're a part of nature. As we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. It's a selfish thing to want to protect nature.

Man's war against nature is a war against himself.

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

Humanity is cutting down its forests, apparently oblivious to the fact that we may not be able to live without them.

The great ecosystems are like complex tapestries - a million complicated threads, interwoven, make up the whole picture. Nature can cope with small rents in the fabric; it can even, after a time, cope with major disasters like floods, fires, and earthquakes. What nature cannot cope with is the steady undermining of its fabric by the activities of man.

To survive, humans need food, water, and air. Yet biodiversity, the Earth's bodies of water, and the planet's atmosphere are all under threat.

When a child is starving, a family may not be able to think about long-term sustainability or damage to ecosystems that support endangered species.

We are the only species systematically destroying its own habitat.

I don't think the planet can survive people. It's not the other way around. I don't think the planet can survive.

If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.

I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans.

My perspective is the Earth will be here. It just may not be habitable to our life form. We get confused. We think we're the center of everything.

The earth is one big interconnected entity. If you hurt a piece, you hurt the whole. If you hurt the people, you hurt the environment.

There is nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine ... been here 4 1/2 billion years. We've been here, what, a 100,000 years, maybe 200,000. And we've only been engaged in heavy industry a little over 200 years. 200 years versus 4 1/2 billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we're a threat? The planet isn't going away. We are.

The recent upsurge of public concern over environmental questions reflects a belated recognition that man has been too cavalier in his relations with nature. Unless we arrest the depredations that have been inflicted so carelessly on our natural systems-which exist in an intricate set of balances-we face the prospect of ecological disaster.

On my 70th birthday, I was asked how I felt about mankind's prospects. This is my reply: We are behaving like yeasts in a brewer's vat, multiplying mindlessly while greedily consuming the substance of a finite world. If we continue to imitate the yeasts, we will perish as they perish, having exhausted our resources and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes. Unlike the yeasts, we have a choice. What will it be?

I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

We are facing a tipping point of environmental crisis unprecedented in human history and our very survival is dependent on protecting nature.