Rachel Carson Quotes

You can't eat fish. It's 6,000 parts DDT per million all over the world, not counting radiation.

As cruel a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

I don’t think that there is ever a Mission Accomplished with an oil spill…the consequences go on for years.

Everything is poisonous, nothing is poisonous, it is all a matter of dose.

As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.

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.

It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it.

The destruction of the natural beauty, the ecosystems, and the majesty of mountains affect us in ways we're not even aware of. Every time a mountain is beheaded, we chop off a little part of our souls.

Wild animals are just as confused as people are now. You've got toxins in the water, oil, sewage, all sorts of things.

Shrimp farms are a scourge on the earth, frankly, from an environmental point of view. They pour huge amounts of pollutants into the ocean. They also pollute their next-door neighbors.

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

Genetic pollution is considerably more dangerous than oil spills. You can’t just go out there and put a boom around it and put it back in.

Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.

Strip mining is man’s thorough and total assault upon his planet.

Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.

When geologists announced the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, humans destroying the environment, one of the main things they pointed to is the use of plastics in the earth.

How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?

All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology. There is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that it previously produced.

There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.

Brothers and Sisters: Our ancient homeland is spotted today with an array of chemical dumps. Along the Niagara River, dioxin, a particularly deadly substance, threatens the remaining life there and in the waters which flow from there. Forestry departments spray the surviving forests with powerful insecticides to encourage tourism by people seeking a few days or weeks away from the cities where the air hangs heavy with sulphur and carbon oxides.

The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us.

We pull out of the ground death, we burn death in our power plants, and then we act shocked when we get death in the form of oil spills and global warming.

Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.