Natural Barriers Quotes

Another factor aggravating the isolation of the South American republics one from another is that in almost every instance their centers of population and of industrial development are distant from their frontiers. Moreover, the border zones between the different countries are, with few exceptions, wildernesses of mountains, desert or jungle. The Andes Mountains not only present a natural barrier which stretches the length of the continent between the east and west coast countries, but they also act to keep apart Pacific coast nations such as Peru and Ecuador.

Do you know how much land is under ice, rock and snow? Do you know why 90 percent of us live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border? We have this idea we're a vast country. But the reality is that a lot of it, a huge amount, is uninhabitable.

Mountains define you. You cannot define / Them.

Im a strong proponent of the restoration of the wetlands, for a lot of reasons. Theres a practical reason, though, when it comes to hurricanes: The stronger the wetlands, the more likely the damage of the hurricane.

It is not differences of opinion; it is geographical lines, rivers, and mountains which divide State from State, and make different nations of mankind.

Most of the really successful civilisations survived because they were protected from invasion by mountains, sea, deserts, or a combination of these things. Ask the Russians or the Poles what it's like to live without the shield of the sea.

Religions . . . seem to avoid mountain passes.

No nation ever had two better friends that we have. You know who they are? The Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth.

To conquer nature is, in effect, to remove all natural barriers and human norms and to substitute artificial, fabricated equivalents for natural processes.

It was a republic, but unlike any other republic that had ever existed. There were neither taxes nor police, nor an army, nor an administrative officer, nor a foreign policy, nor indeed any joint means of coercion; only the heads of the scattered settlements—settlements divided one from another by snow mountains and lava fields and belts of black volcanic sand and pebbles — met together once a year in a common assembly and agreed to obey and enforce a common law.

After Hurricane Katrina, many people said that the levees were not as effective as the natural vegetation that had been removed at the coast. So that means as we develop these seaside land masses, we need to have enough knowledge to not regret in the future. We know that the US government is literally buying these lands back to allow them to be rehabilitated.