Environmental Perception Quotes

One person's car is another person's scenery.

I've tried to divide my time between the US and New Zealand, but it's difficult, and I suddenly realized that I like acting here in Los Angeles anyway. Because when you first come here; especially from New Zealand, you go, This is the ugliest, nastiest, grayest, smoggiest town in the world, and then your scale of beauty adjusts and suddenly you think, Oh, isn't it beautiful, not too much smog today!

The term 'natural resources' confuses people. 'Natural resources' are not like a finite number of gifts under the Christmas tree. Nature is given, but resources are created.

We rely, I think, on landscape photography to make intelligible to us what we already know.

I discovered that close to half the planet is 'pristine.' We live in towns such as London, Paris or Sao Paulo and have the impression that all the pristine areas are gone, but they are not.

In a way, whoever you know in a certain place defines that place for you.

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.

I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

Nature is about smelling, hearing, tasting, seeing.

I'm from the East Coast, and so therefore, the Pacific Northwest forest is very exotic land to me.

For me, being in a car or on an airplane is like being in limbo. It's this dead zone between two places. But to walk, you're some place that's already interesting. You're not just between places. Things are happening.

Our biggest challenges for the ocean and for the planet are problems of perception. People need to understand that species extinctions, habitat destruction, ocean acidification, and pollution are all chipping away at the resilience of the thin layer of life that sustains us on Spaceship Earth.

The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.

The awareness of our environment came progressively in all countries with different outlets.

The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.

One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.

Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home.

As a scientist, objectivity is one of my most deeply held values. If we could just try harder, I once thought, surely we could each see the world as others see it and learn to respect one another's views more readily. But I learned from the Pirahas, our expectations, our culture, and our experiences can render even perceptions of the environment nearly incommensurable cross-culturally.

If you went to the headwaters of most rivers of the United States, you'd have a wonderful naturalistic hike or trek, but you wouldn't find a shrine there. At the headwaters of the rivers of India, they are pilgrimage places.

[D]id you really expect fairness on the environmental issue? For a swathe of reporters, this is not a matter of empirical reporting; it's a matter of faith. Bush cannot be pro-environment because he's Bush.