Kalle Lasn Quotes

Does your desire to smoke anywhere, at any time, trump the right of others to breathe clean air … ? … The need to breathe clean air is more important than the license to pollute it.

Pure air, pure water, the inspection of unhealthy habitations, the adulteration of food, these and many kindred matters may be legitimately dealt with by the Legislature;

We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences. Instead, we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage into our neighbor's yard.

Should a small business or a large business be able to pollute the water or the air or the food? No, I hope you don't believe that.

Despite Arizona's remarkable growth in recent years, we have met the current federal health standards for ozone pollution and the Environmental Protection Agency recently approved our dust control plan.

The Chinese have figured out that they have a giant environmental problem. Folks in Beijing, some days, literally can't breathe. Over a million Chinese die prematurely every year because of air pollution.

One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.

There are real and growing dangers to our simple and most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we bring, and the land which sustains us.... If we do not act, the world of the year 2000 will be much less able to sustain life than it is now.

The people of West Virginia deserve jobs. But the people of West Virginia also deserve clean water.

We've sued out-of-state power plants that are polluting our air and led a coalition of attorneys general from Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, and Massachusetts against efforts in the U.S. House of Representatives to remove critical environmental regulations that protect New York communities from toxic pollution.

Without the EPA and the national pollution safeguards it enforces, more children would have asthma. Our water would be less safe. More chemicals would poison our bodies. And more people would die prematurely from respiratory diseases and heart attacks.

Years of government inaction on air pollution has got people thinking that the state cannot even protect basic public goods like clean air.

A lot of people think that regulations bring higher costs, but regulation is also about making sure that someone doesn't get to beat out the competition because they're dumping filth in the river or spewing poisons in the air.

It will be controlled when the people of America, through their elected representatives, demand the right to air that they and their children can breathe without fear..

Critics play a dangerous game when they denounce the science and law EPA has used to defend clean air for more than 40 years. The American people know better.

People say that I'm a tree hugger, but I do a lot more than hug trees. I like having my drinking water without faecal matter, that's really nice. Or acceptable levels of strychnine. I'm an air breather, I've gotten used to that over the years.

Of all the problems of conservation, none is more urgent that the polluted air which endangers the American people. We have been fortunate so far. But we have seen that when winds fail to blow, the concentrations of poisonous clouds over our cities can become perilous.

The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?

As a society, almost one 1 of 2 adults has a chronic disease of one form or another. And where we're spending $3 trillion a year not on a healthcare system, but on a sick-care system that tries to patch us up after we've been made ill by a variety of institutional things around us - including a sick food system, air pollution, etc. Where we could be doing so much better even before people get to the point of getting sick.

The 1970s must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment. It is literally now or never.

I think every single American believes they have a right to clean air and clean water.

Clean air, clean water, open spaces - these should once again be the birthright of every American.

Corporate polluters, their phony think tanks and political toadies like to marginalize environmentalists as tree huggers, or radicals. But there is nothing radical about clean air or water.

The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute.

We still have too much air and water pollution and we still need to work to reduce it. But we also need to put the problem of pollution into a historical as well as scientific perspective.