Alan Weisman Quotes

#1. But the Earth holds ghosts, even of entire nations.

Alan Weisman

#2. You understand ... just what the Taoists mean when they say that soft is stronger than hard.

Alan Weisman

#3. In New York, the European starling - now a ubiquitous avian pest from Alaska to Mexico - was introduced because someone thought the city would be more cultured if Central Park were home to each bird mentioned in Shakespeare.

Alan Weisman

#4. Before artificial nitrogen fertilizer became widely available, the world's population was around 2 billion. When we no longer have it - or if we ever decide to stop using it - that may be the number to which our own naturally gravitates.

Alan Weisman

#5. Most people would rather not hear about the environment because it's scary, so my goal was to write something that was readable so that people would learn a lot and not be so depressed that they would throw the book away.

Alan Weisman

#6. Puszcza, an old Polish word, means "forest primeval." Straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, the half-million acres of the Bialowieza Puszcza contain Europe's last remaining fragment of old-growth, lowland wilderness.

Alan Weisman

#7. Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.

Alan Weisman

#8. Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same.

Alan Weisman

#9. Back above ground, like robotic versions of the mosques and minarets that grace the shores of Istanbul's Bosphorus, Houston's petroscape of domed white tanks and silver fractioning towers spreads along the banks of its Ship Channel.

Alan Weisman

#10. The Panama Canal,' says Abdiel Perez, 'is like a wound that humans inflicted on the Earth
one that nature is trying to heal.

Alan Weisman

#11. For years, I have been looking for a way to look at the whole global environmental situation, which I have the privilege and burden of covering. And I wanted to give people a way to do something about it.

Alan Weisman

#12. Paranormalists, however, insist that our minds are transmitters that, with special effort, can focus like lasers to communicate across great distances, and even make things happen. That may seem far-fetched, but it's also a definition of prayer.

Alan Weisman

#13. We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.

Alan Weisman

#14. In the day after humans disappear, nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house - our houses.

Alan Weisman

#15. In recent years, a green burial movement has protested formaldehyde, which oxidizes to formic acid, the toxic in fire ants and bee stingers, as yet one more poison to leach into water tables: careless people, polluting even from the tomb.

Alan Weisman

#16. Nobility is expensive, nonproductive, and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society's energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.

Alan Weisman

#17. The worst happens, and life still goes on.

Alan Weisman