Harry M. Caudill Quotes

The coal industry held the title deed to the future and devoured the land, people, and culture with a Satanic appetite.

Fracking kills, and it doesn't just kill us. It kills the land, nature and, eventually, the whole world.

We've raped our homelands to maintain our economies.

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

In the central Indian state of Orissa, mining has scarred the landscape, and it is already too late to secure most of the traditional elephant corridors.

The causal chain of the deterioration (of the environment) is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide---all can be traced easily to too many people.

Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.

Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore,, Currents of debris upon my breast.

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

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

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, / For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. / America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, / And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.

The 20th century peatlands ditching in Finland was the worst human environmental destruction action in Europe.

What I loathe is the multi-national conglomerates who must take responsibility for the degradation and pollution of so much of our landscape with their factory farming and greed.

You know, the environment is fragmenting, and the environment is, in many places, absolutely hideous!

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse.

White males are the most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today.

I see a lot of damage to Mother Earth. I see water being taken from creeks where water belongs to animals, not to oil companies.

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

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.

There is hardly a place on Earth where people do not log, pave, spray, drain, flood, graze, fish, plow, burn, drill, spill or dump. There is no life zone, with the possible exception of the deep ocean, that we are not degrading.

Man is complex—he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century

In order to produce enough gold to create a wedding band, … a mine would have to extract tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds of ore. … each mine produces thousands of tons of waste rock and other materials. The end result is that mines across the West create millions of tons of waste. This waste is usually stored on the earth's surface in vast piles that may be hundreds of feet high and cover an area the size of several football fields.