Mike White Quotes

My father gave me this poster from National Geographic back in the very early 70s, so I was a young teenager. It showed how man polluted his world. And the issues that they talked about, whether it was water pollution, air, or terrestrial... The issues that they talk about on this poster are still very much present today.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

Loads of chemicals and hazardous wastes have been introduced into the atmosphere that didn't even exist in 1948. The environmental condition of the planet is far worse than it was 42 years ago.

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.

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

Environmental crimes often and in death and disease

When I was 7 years old, I announced that I was going to write a book about pollution. I didn't get around to it until I was 29, but I always recognized that pollution was a theft. That it was a way of stealing something from the public - the common earth.

The plundering for profit of the world's natural resources has threatened the very sustainability of the planet.

I like greenery, nature, I don't like littering the streets. The progress of science and technology comes at a cost and I don't think we can still fathom the extent of this 'cost'.

Many of the environmental rules not only fail to protect the natural environment, they actually increase the damage.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

Wouldn't it help Americans more, in the long run, if we were forced to accept some responsibility for the environmental wreckage we prefer to assume is totally out of our control?

Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.

I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.

We humans are the greatest of earth's parasites.

Further devastation of the air, land and sea is obviously a very real possibility, unless the attitudes of politicians and all who irresponsibly exploit our natural resources change significantly in the very near future and all collaborate and sacrifice for the good of the planet.

That area environmentally is a waste. You can't do anything. I don't care if the Sierra Club goes out there. It is fully polluted! You're not only going to work to clean up the environment, but also you will put people to work.

Everybody knows that the industrialized nations are the worst offenders.

I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.

Perhaps it has been too uncomfortable for those with vested interests to acknowledge, but we have spent the best part of the past century enthusiastically testing the world to utter destruction; not looking closely enough at the long-term impact our actions will have.

All European tradition, Marxism included, has conspired to defy the natural order of all things. Mother Earth has been abused, the powers have been abused, and this cannot go on forever. No theory can alter that simple fact. Mother Earth will retaliate, the whole environment will retaliate, and the abusers will be eliminated.