Ecological Cost Quotes

For centuries, building materials were free. You want to build a house, you cut down some trees. But we haven't been thinking about the cost to the planet.

Conservation is not without a cost.

I wish being a beekeeper, which I am, gave you a free pass on the carbon footprint, but it doesn't.

Nothing exists except by virtue of a disequilibrium, an injustice. All existence is a theft paid for by other existences; no life flowers except on a cemetery.

Nature always strikes back. It takes all the running we can do to remain in the same place.

Cutting down a forest for timber adds to GDP, but what we don't record is the loss to our wealth in terms of natural resources.

Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?

When it comes to environmental regulation, the cruelty is the point.

Every breath we take as human beings damages the planet.

Every time there is an economic intensification, there is an ecological impact.

It is not an investment if it destroys the planet

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.

In the global marketplace of the future the price of every product will tell the ecological truth.

Unfortunately, there are some ecological phenomenological chemicals within consumerism.

The government tells us we need flood control and comes to straighten the creek in our pasture. The engineer on the job tells us the creek is now able to carry off more flood water, but in the process we have lost our old willows where the owl hooted on a winter night and under which the cows switched flies in the noon shade. We lost the little marshy spot where our fringed gentians bloomed.

If a caribou needs to be sacrificed for the sake of energy independence, I say, 'Mr. Caribou, maybe you need to take one for the team.'