environmental context Quotes

'The Skeptical Environmentalist' was much more the idea of the scientific argument of realizing that we need to be skeptical about a lot of these stories that we hear and to put them in context.

The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them.

Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place.

Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see; not the object isolated as in a test tube, but the object enveloped in sunlight and atmosphere, with the blue dome of Heaven reflected in the shadows.

You may be on land, yet not in a garden.

When I’m working with materials it’s not just the leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are behind them that are important. That’s what I’m trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole.

It's very important to set your place in a concrete environment. I think Chekhov said that the important thing when you have a play or any kind of novel is to set the roots in a concrete place.

We live in media, as fish live in water.

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it

If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.

We could've done this anywhere, but I wanted you to see me, to see this," he said, gesturing at the room. "I wanted you to know where I come from, what I am under the choices I make.

It's important to understand differences in scale and environment.

The flowers never waste their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or waft their scents.

Architecture has its own realm. It has a special physical relationship with life. I do not think of it primarily as either a message or symbol, but as an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the silence of sleep.

The environment is more than just nature. The environment is peoples needs.

Our body is part of nature. Our creations, they're not natural. We build things that aren't natural, but our bodies, they're part of that system.

When you draw a crowd of people in a street or room or landscape, decide whether you want to say that the people dominate the place or that the place is more important than the people.

A natural historian is somebody who looks at something in terms of its relationship to the rest of the natural world. You look at things ecologically. When you see a cow on a feedlot, you don't just see a cow; you see a cow that is eating certain food. You follow that food and that food takes you back to a corn field.

Whether the flower looks better in the nosegay than in the meadow where it grew and we had to wet our feet to get it! Is the scholastic air any advantage?

Our oceans cover two-thirds of what my grandfather called our water planet, and the part of the ocean that falls under the jurisdiction of the United States covers an area larger than the country itself.

I don't think you can separate a place from its history. I think a place is much more than the bricks and mortar that go into its construction. I think it's more than the accidental topography of the ground it stands on.

It's important to see things in perspective. Automobile traffic is responsible for only 12 percent of total CO2 emissions. One should be able to point this out without being accused of changing the subject.

Noise pollution is a relative thing. In a city, it's a jet plane taking off. In a monastery, it's a pen that scratches.

I slowly dismantled the act of painting, to consider the possibility that no-thing ever really transcends its immediate environment.

My architecture is very much place-related.