Joel Salatin Quotes

Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.

Texas was mostly short-grass and tall-grass prairie when modern Europeans arrived here. It really was a land of milk and honey. But when they brought all these cattle onto these relatively small bits of land, and the cattle were allowed to graze freely, they essentially destroyed the prairie.

Land degradation did not start with chemical agriculture. But chemical agriculture offered new tools for annihilation.

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

Loss of soil productivity, which is causing extensive land abandonment, is a widespread by-product of current practices in agriculture and animal husbandry. Since 1945, 11 percent of the earth's vegetated surface has been degraded—an area larger than India and China combined—and per capita food production in many parts of the world is decreasing.

Our planetary system is affected by a magnitude of force as powerful as any naturally occurring global catastrophe, but one caused solely by a single species: us.

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

Evolution is a mistake. Humans are a mistake. We've destroyed our planet.

An Ecologist lives in a world of wounds.

The tropical rain forests are a telling example. Once cut down, they rarely recover. Rainfall drops, deserts spread, the climate warms.

We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we've smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don't think it's our privilege to behave this way.

When I arrived on the planet, there were only two billion. Wildlife was more abundant, we were less so; now the situation is reversed.

We see evidence that lakes and forests and wetlands can have different equilibria - so you have a savanna system that may be stable and thriving, but it can also tip over and become an arid steppe if pushed too far by warming, land degradation, and biodiversity loss.

For 200 years we've been conquering nature. Now we're beating it to death.

Humans are upsetting a fragile balance that their own human ancestors established.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

I was so fanatical about trying to save wildlife... I was unable to accept that we couldn't solve this problem of thousands of years, of wherever humans operated, the environment deteriorated.

When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.

We are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature... In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the Earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.

Africa is the most weathered continent in the world; 75 percent of its soil has been degraded. You don't just bring that back. I always like to say it's like putting an oxygen mask on a cadaver; it just isn't going to work.

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

People in general romanticize nature, and they make it out to be something that it isn't because humans are so awful. And yes, we are absolutely screwing up this planet, but that is only because we have the capabilities to do so. Animals are not better than us. They are not nicer than us.

Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.

What I have found most surprising is the amount of damage we have done to environment in the course of my lifetime - not even five and a half decades.