Natural Resource Exploitation Quotes

Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals—not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements.

The axe and saw are insanely busy, chips are flying thick as snowflakes, and every summer thousands of acres of priceless forests, with their underbrush, soil, springs, climate, scenery, and religion, are vanishing away in clouds of smoke, while, except in the national parks, not one forest guard is employed.

Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic.

Capitalism is destroying Mother Earth, and to destroy Mother Earth is to destroy humanity.

The only biodiversity we're going to have left is Coke versus Pepsi. We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time.

Our insatiable drive to rummage deep beneath the surface of the earth is a willful expansion of our dysfunctional civilization into Nature.

Humans will take a rain forest and lose it and cover it with concrete. They will take the woods and turn it into a parking garage and I am not saying that's bad. I am just saying that's what we do. We occupy the planet with a vengeance. We seek to dominate it.

When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people. So our environmental movements have been justice movements.

What opened up the American West was the fact that you owned the real estate. You owned the gold mines, the oil wells. The creation of these, back then, million dollar industries drove the railroads and eventually the airlines to provide this kind of transportation.

It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history

Because the public lands belong to all Americans, this 1872 Mining Act should be repealed.

If oil exploration can threaten a place as beautiful and meaningful as Virunga, where next?

Runaway technology, whose only law is profit, has for years poisoned our air, ravaged our soil, stripped our forests bare, and corrupted our water resources

When people encroach on forest land and in the periphery of habitats of wild animals, they attack humans.

Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.

what man calls civilizationalways results in desertsman is never on the squarehe uses up the fat and greenery of the eartheach generation wastes a little moreof the future with greed and lust for riches

Industries who profit by the rape of our environment see to it that legislators friendly to their attitudes are elected, and that bureaucrats of similar attitude are appointed.

I see how these beautiful forests are now open to destruction because of technology. Companies are able to get into more and more remote places that weren't economically viable before.

Oil drilling and coal mining are killing endangered wildlife, polluting rivers, creating smog over wilderness areas and blocking wildlife corridors in America's most treasured landscapes.

We all have to acknowledge a simple fact: Africa is growing.

In Kentucky, we're destroying mountains, including their soils and forests, in order to get at the coal. In other words, we're destroying a permanent value in order to get at an almost inconceivably transient value. That coal has a value only if and when it is burnt. And after it is burnt, it is a pollutant and a waste-a burden.

The 'environmental crisis' has happened because the human household or economy is in conflict at almost every point with the household of nature. We have built our household on the assumption that the natural household is simple and can be simply used. We have assumed increasingly over the last five hundred years that nature is merely a supply of 'raw materials,' and that we may safely possess those materials by taking them.... And so we will be wrong if we attempt to correct what we perceive as 'environmental' problems without correcting the economic oversimplification that caused them.

My heart breaks living in southern Utah on the edge of America's Redrock Wilderness, witnessing what the Bush Administration's policies regarding oil and gas exploitation are doing to our public lands that belong to all Americans. Their policy is not about the public or the public's best interest. It is about the oil and gas corporations' best interests. The Secretary of the Interior is urging the Bureau of Land Management to support the gas and oil industry's most extreme drilling scenario in some of the American West's most pristine and fragile areas without proper legal and public input.

The modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and ruthless mining, national debts recklessly increased until they are repudiated, and continual revision of positive law, is evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors.