Nathaniel Rich Quotes

India's elite wants not just cosmetic environmentalism, but a consumer-environmentalism. It wants to have good areas to go for tourism to. So it's happy to have national parks, because people can go for wildlife tourism. Or good beaches. But they don't want, and don't care about, a livelihood environmentalism.

I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.

Preserving parks and open spaces is a winner because it doesn't need to be explained to everyday Americans.

If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings.

The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.

Nothing can be more striking to one who is accustomed to the little inclosures called public parks in our American cities, than the spacious, open grounds of London. I doubt, in fact, whether any person fully comprehends their extent, from any of the ordinary descriptions of them, until he has seen them or tried to walk over them.

Parks are as essential to the physical and emotional health of a city as the water supply.

To protect the environment, you have to work from the outside, not the inside.

Every acre of forest should belong to the people.

True conservation means protecting the entire habitat.

Whether that be starting conversations about environmental conservation or taking part in being a voice for people who don't have a voice, I just want to help people however I can.

How can you save the rain forests, the planet's wildlife, without funds?

We have ended the dreaded Communism, we must now end the dreaded capitalism.... We have to use less. Cutting our consumption by 75% is a very reasonable and relatively easily obtainable goal.

If you’re a Chinese mayor and have to choose between growing jobs and cutting pollution, you will invariably choose jobs: Coughing workers are much less politically dangerous than unemployed workers.

If you develop in the old fashioned way there are enormous costs (to the environment)….but we have to demonstrate it, not just tell people.

We thought it was a very good idea in this day and age of threat to biodiversity….we believe the scope for ecotourism is great.

There is nothing so American as our national parks …. They are not just for rich people.

There are fewer chemical pollutants in the air. Our drinking water is safer. Our food standards have been raised. We've cleaned up more toxic waste sites in three years than the previous administrations did in twelve. The environment is cleaner, and we have fought off the most vigorous assault on environmental protection since we began to protect the environment in 1970. We are moving in the right direction to the 21st century.

As a nation we have not yet come to have a proper respect for the forest and to regard it as an indispensable part of our resources—one which is easily destroyed but difficult to replace; one which confers great benefits while it endures, but whose disappearance is accompanied by a train of evil consequences not readily foreseen and positively irreparable.

Land use is becoming more and more a general national interest and should be as much a study in the cities as in the country. For with the proper use of land, many of our greatest troubles—dust storms, floods, over-production of this and that, would at least be measurably controlled.

If you don’t put positive things in the city’s open spaces, they will be filled by negative things.

The only reason that people will preserve anything in nature is if money can be made off of it.

Global warming is socialism in drag.

The world must now either accept long-term chaos for the sake of short term comforts or make short term sacrifices for the sake of long term comforts.

To change our laws and culture, the green movement must attract and include the majority of all people, not just the majority of affluent people