Conservation Movement Quotes

The only trouble with the movement for the preservation of our forests is that it has not gone nearly far enough, and was not begun soon enough.

Theodore Roosevelt provoked an outcry when he banned Christmas Trees from the White House as a conservationist measure, but he relented when convinced that his position was untenable.

The conservation movement, the environmental movement as we know it, really needed to adopt some of the tactics that the civil rights movement and the anti-nuclear movement were already using successfully.

The purpose of the Conservation movement is to make our country a permanent and prosperous home for ourselves, and for our children, and for our children’s children.

There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

Part of the reason I had such a drive to be an activist, and support other activists, is because I was raised Quaker and my parents kept us very much informed and involved as kids in civil rights and the conservation movement.

Musicians have made incredible contributions to the conservation and environmental movement and continue to do so, more than ever.

Most of what I know about environmental conservation I learned from my father, who has been a leader within the movement for over 30 years.

I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra Club in '52, walked the plank there in '69, founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters after that.

I was running for mayor of Syracuse - the first woman to run for mayor in our city, or in New York, and one of the first in the United States. I was known for my strong conservation plank. In 1969, the term 'conservation' was hardly on the tip of every citizen's tongue.

The Sierra Club in the United States has now really come out for population control and reduction.

We have a very old conservation movement, particularly in the United States, which has focused on campaigns to protect endangered species: the spotted owl, the old-growth forest. But usually it stops there. To me, biodiversity is the full spectrum. Species conservation is not only about wilderness conservation. It’s also about protecting the livelihood of people even while changing the dominant relationship that humans have had with other species. In India, it’s an economic issue, not just an ecological one.

I am delighted to learn that the small part I played in the campaign to protect the white cliffs of Dover has been so effective.

Most of us still believe in the intrinsic value of nature, but I think the first century of the environmental/conservation movement demonstrated pretty clearly that this value cannot compel a civilization-wide shift toward sustainable behavior and enterprise when stacked up against the urgent economic and social needs of 7 billion people, most of whom are struggling to get out of poverty.

I'm a little different from all those conservation types.

If you take guys like Exequiel Bustillo, the architect who designed the early park infrastructure in Argentina, or the great American architects, these guys had a vision that thrust the national park idea into the public eye.

I began working with the John Muir Institute and then started helping found Friends of the Earth organizations here and there in other countries. That pretty well brings us up to the present.