Posted on 03/28/2002 8:48:47 AM PST by gaelwolf
"We must... reclaim the roads and the plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to wilderness millions and tens of millions of [acres of] presently settled land." - Dave Foreman, quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Trashing the Planet
"We advocate bio-diversity for bio-diversity's sake. That says man is no more important than any other species... It may well take our extinction to set things straight." - Dave Foreman, quoted Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb in their book Trashing the Economy
"An Ice Age is coming and I welcome it as much-needed changing. I see no solution to our ruination of earth except for a drastic reduction of the human population." - Dave Foreman, quoted in From the Trenches, a publication of Putting People First, March 1, 1993
"While the death of young men in war is unfortunate, it is no more serious than the touching of mountains and wilderness areas by humankind." - David Brower, quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Environmental Overkill
"The Sierra Club made the Nature Conservancy look reasonable. I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We're still waiting for someone else to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable." - David Brower, quoted by Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb in their book Trashing the Economy
"Loggers losing their jobs because of Spotted Owl legislation is, in my eyes, no different than people being out of work after the furnaces of Dachau shut down." -David Brower, quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Environmental Overkill
Al Gore defining a tree as one-third of a human being...
"The Pacific yew can be cut down and processed to produce a potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of lung, breast, and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly die. It seems an easy choice -- sacrifice the tree for a human life -- until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated, that only specimens more than a hundred years old contain the potent chemical in their bark, and that there are very few of these yews remaining on earth." - Albert Gore in his book Earth in the Balance
Al Gore on how free speech and honest debate just get in the way...
"[The] fact that we face an ecological crisis without any precedent in historic times is no longer a matter of dispute worthy of recognition... And those who, for the purpose of maintaining balance in the debate, take the contrarian view that there is significant uncertainty about whether it's real are hurting our ability to respond." - Albert Gore quoted in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, August 5, 1990
"...[The loggers'] jobs would have been lost anyway as soon as the remaining 10 percent of the forest was cut. The only issue was whether they would shift to new employment before or after the last remnant of forest was gone." - Albert Gore explaining his support for restrictions on logging in the Pacific Northwest, in his book Earth in the Balance
"Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun." - Dr. Paul Erlich, quoted by R. Emmett Tyrrell in The American Spectator, September 6, 1992
"We've already had too much economic growth in the United States. Economic growth in rich countries like ours is the disease, not the cure." - Dr. Paul Erlich, quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Trashing the Planet
"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer." - Dr. Paul Ehrlich in his book, The Population Bomb (1968), predicting widespread famine that never materialized
"If we don't change, our species will not survive... Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse." -Maurice Strong quoted in the September 1, 1997 edition of National Review magazine.
"We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy. " - Timothy Wirth quoted in Science Under Siege by Michael Fumento, 1993
"I was the person who first thought up the tactic of tree spiking and as such I feel obligated to defend this child of my imagination... As a child I witnessed my father break a chainsaw on a horseshoe that had been nailed to a tree a century before and became over time internal armor protecting the heart of the elderly and noble being. I was delighted." - Paul Watson, quoted by Ron Arnold and Alan Gottlieb in their book Trashing the Economy
"A reporter called Paul [Watson] to see if Sea Shepherd wanted to accept responsibility [for sinking two Icelandic ships]. Of course, if lightning struck a whaling ship, Paul would accept responsibility for it." - Quote by Rodney Coronado, founder of the Animal Liberation Front, cited in Trashing the Economy (1990). Coronado, then in hiding, was being sought in connection with the fire-bombing of a Michigan State University laboratory
"It doesn't matter what is true; it only matters what people believe is true... You are what the media define you to be. [Greenpeace] became a myth and a myth-generating machine." - Paul Watson, qQuoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Environmental Overkill
"Quickly capping 363 oil well fires in a war zone is impossible. The fires would burn out of control until they put themselves out... The resulting soot might well stretch over all of South Asia... It could be carried around the world... [and] the consequences could be dire. Beneath such a pall sunlight would be dimmed, temperatures lowered and droughts more frequent. Spring and summer frosts may be expected... This endangerment of the food supplies... appears to be likely enough that it should affect the war plans..." - Sagan in op/ed he co-authored with Richard Turco, The Baltimore Sun, January 31, 1991, commenting during the Gulf War on the impact of oil well fires
Dr. Stephen Scheider is one of the foremost proponents of global warming theory. He holds a Ph.D. in plasma physics from Columbia University, and appears to be all over the map, even in his core research area of global warming...which gives us an interesting set of quotes. I wonder if he checks back to see what he's said in the past before opening up in present? I just offer these up...you decide.
"A cooling trend has set in, perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age." - Twenty-year-old Schneider quote cited in the Washington Times, June 12, 1992
"Temperatures do not increase in proportion to an atmospheric increase in CO2... Even an eight-fold increase... might warm earth's surface less than two degrees Centigrade, and this is highly unlikely in the next several thousand years." - from paper Schneider co-authored in 1971 cited in Environmental Overkill by Dixy Lee Ray (1993)
"[Global warming linked to emissions of CO2, methane and other gases] is a scientific phenomenon beyond doubt. It's only a question of how much warming there will be." - Quoted by David L. Chandler of the Boston Globe, January 23, 1989
""It is journalistically irresponsible to present both sides [of the global warming theory] as though it were a question of balance. " - Quoted in the Boston Globe, May 31, 1992
"Looking at every bump and wiggle... is a waste of time.. I don't set very much store by looking at the direct evidence." -Quoted in the Washington Times, June 12, 1992
"[We] have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." -Quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in Trashing the Planet (1990)
"We must identify our enemies and drive them into oblivion." - Bruce Babbitt in his introduction to the League of Conservation Voters' 1991 Environmental Scorecard
"We ought to make the whole state [of Alaska] an historical park so people can... see how folks thought in the 19th Century." - George Frampton, speaking at an Earth Day press conference, April 21, 1992
"Building an environmentally sustainable future requires restricting the global economy, dramatically changing human reproductive behavior, and altering values and lifestyles. Doing this quickly requires nothing short of a revolution." - Lester Brown, quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Environmental Overkill
"A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect." - Richard Benedick quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Trashing the Planet
"Don't worry about the blandness of the final [Global Climate] treaty, because it has hidden teeth that will develop in the right circumstances." - Richard Benedick quoted by The New York Times, June 14, 1992
"Scientists who work for nuclear power or nuclear energy have sold their soul to the devil. They are either dumb, stupid, or highly compromised... Free enterprise really means rich people get richer. And they have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process... Capitalism is destroying the earth. Cuba is a wonderful country. What Castro's done is superb." - Dr. Helen Caldicott quoted by Dixy Lee Ray in her book Trashing the Planet
"I don't agree with ... [weighing economic as well as biological factors in endangered species listings]. If you do that, you would simply never list anything." -Jack Ward Thomas quoted in the Rocky Mountain News, December 28, 1993
"If we weren't blathering about old growth and owls, [the threat to ecosystems in east-side Oregon forests] would be the hottest story in forestry." -Jack Ward Thomas, quoted in The Washington Post, May 15, 1992
"It may well be that there are a significant number of northern spotted owl on private lands in California, but so what? The injunction [against logging] controls the issue now." -Jack Ward Thomas quoted by Greg Easterbrook in The New Republic, March 28, 1994
"The only hope of the Earth is to withdraw huge areas as inviolate natural sanctuaries from the depredations of modern industry and technology. Move out the people and cars. Reclaim the roads and the plowed lands."
--Dave Foreman,
Confessions of an Eco-Warrior
Foreman is one of the principal founders of and remains invovled with the Wildlands Project.
"At first glance, a vision of North America with regained wildness and biodiversity seems unrealistic, even utopian. But when we consider that restoration at this scale is a process requiring decades or even centuries, it begins to make sense."
(Noss and Cooperrider, 1994, "Saving Natures Legacy, Protecting and Restoring Biodiversity." Island Press, Washington, D.C.)
Reed Noss is the founder and director of the , who have devised a comprehensive plan for the Pacific Northwest.
"Does all the foregoing mean that Wild Earth and The Wildlands Project advocate the end of industrialized civilization? Most assuredly. Everything civilized must go..."
"Ecology is a limited science which makes use of scientific methods."
"...it should, first of all, be borne in mind that the norms and tendencies of the Deep Ecology movement are not derived from ecology by logic or induction."
--Arne Naess, as quoted in Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, pgs 154-153
"The crucial paradigm shift the Deep Ecology movement envisions as necessary to protect the planet from ecological destruction involves the move from an anthropocentric to a spiritual/ecocentric value orientation...Humanity must drastically scale down its industrial activities on Earth, change its consumption lifestyles, stabilize and then reduce the size of the human population by humane means, and protect and restore wild ecosystems and the remaining wildlife on the planet."
-- George Sessions, pg xxi, Deep Ecology for the 21st Century
"My job, which I do with The Wildlands Project, is to conceptualize a new kind of reserve system that does deep ecology on the ground, because deep ecology isn't deep ecology when it's just academic intellectual masturbation. Deep ecology becomes something real when it motivates our day-to-day actions, and there is no more honorable thing any of us can do with our lives than to work to put part of the world off-limits to the activities of human beings."
Dave Foreman, A Dialogue with Derrick Jensen
"Because we might not have any places big enough for large predators except in Alaska or northern Canada, Reed Noss and other conservation biologists have begun working with metapopulations [see: "Gap Analysis"]. That involves preserving corridors which link, for example, the Yellowstone National Park ecosystem with the Glacier/Bob Marshall ecosystem and the central Idaho ecosystem, as well as the Canadian Rockies. In the East, we want a connected chain of wilderness areas from the Everglades to northern Maine and into Canada, so the Eastern Cougar and the Florida Panther will be once again connected. And then of course we need east-west corridors."
Dave Foreman, A Dialogue with Derrick Jensen
"On a practical basis, we start with what we have: The Klamath Forest Alliance has proposed corridors between wilderness areas in northwestern California and has filed lawsuits and appeals to protect those corridors from Forest Service timber sales. Folks with the Southern Rockies Ecosystem Project are mapping all remaining old growth in Colorado and figuring how to connect it into a single linked reserve system."
Dave Foreman, A Dialogue with Derrick Jensen
"Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We're not the brain, we are a cancer on nature."
~Dave Foreman, Harper's, April 1990
"The northern spotted owl is the wildlife species of choice to act as a surrogate for old-growth forest protection," explained Andy Stahl, staff forester for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, at a 1988 law clinic for other environmentalists. "Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Pacific Northwest," he joked, "for if it hadn't, we'd have to genetically engineer it."
-Andy Stahl at a 1988 law clinic for environmentalists, staff forester, Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund
"Now, in a widening sphere of decisions, the costs of error are so exorbitant that we need to act on theory alone, which is to say on prediction alone. It follows that the reputation of scientific prediction needs to be enhanced. But that can happen, paradoxically, only if scientists disavow the certainty and precision that they normally insist on. Above all, we need to learn to act decisively to forestall predicted perils, even while knowing that they may never materialize. We must take action, in a manner of speaking, to preserve our ignorance. There are perils that we can be certain of avoiding only at the cost of never knowing with certainty that they were real."
-Jonathan Shell, author of Our Fragile Earth
"[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
-Stephen Schneider, proponent of the theory that CFCs are depleting the ozone
"We in the Green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which the killing of a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels."
-Carl Amery, Green Party of West Germany
"I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds."
-Paul Watson, founder of Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
"Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental."
Dave Forman
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