Quotes About Environmental Change

#1. The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage.

Charles Darwin

#2. Life has had to deal with environmental change, especially climate change, since the beginning of its existence on Earth.

Daniel Botkin

#3. Women spend 80 cents of every dollar in the marketplace. We could be the most powerful force for economic and environmental change in the 21st century if we focused our money where it could make the biggest difference. If a million people did that, it would have a $1 billion impact.

Diane MacEachern

#4. Pornography and violence are by-products of societies in which private identity has been ... destroyed by sudden environmental change.

Marshall McLuhan

#5. Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don't get wiped out.

Peter Watts

#6. We do not know how much of the environmental change is due to human activities and how much [is due] to long-term natural processes over which we have no control.

Freeman Dyson

#7. The responses that environmentalists evoke - fear, anxiety, numbness, despair - are not helpful, even if they are understandable. It should be fascinating, even enthralling, to be in the milieu of environmental change.

Paul Hawken

#8. If ordinary people really knew that consciousness and not matter is the link that connects us with each other and the world, then their views about war and peace, environmental pollution, social justice, religous values, and all other human endeavors would change radically.

Amit Goswami

#9. I hope that in future Congresses there will reemerge a recognition that climate change is a reality, that our policies to meet our energy needs must also deal responsibly with environmental issues, including the damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Jeff Bingaman

#10. Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us.

Bill Nye

#11. Marketers ... Can't simply put a more environmentally friendly package on the shelves and assume that shoppers will recognize and appreciate the change. If the goal is to drive preference or justify a price premium, the environmental benefit needs to be conveyed.

Scott Young

#12. No matter if the science is all phoney, there are collateral environmental benefits ... climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.

Christine Stewart

#13. I believe that climate change is the great global crisis that we face, environmental crisis. I believe that if you're serious about climate change, you don't encourage the excavation and transportation of very dirty oil.

Bernie Sanders

#14. Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance.

Lester R. Brown

#15. Woe to any climate denier who called climate change a hoax when she was nearby.

Donald G. Firesmith

#16. We study the past history, with the conscience of the present environmental changes; we can only predict the future ecological changes, by emergence of the past into the present.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#17. The Christian gospel is a two-way road. On the one hand, it seeks to change the souls of men, and thereby unite them with God; on the other hand, it seeks to change the environmental conditions of men so the soul will have a chance after it is changed.

Martin Luther

#18. At the same time the folk boom was happening, the civil rights movement was happening, the anti-war movement was happening, the ban the bomb movement was happening, the environmental movement was happening. There was suddenly a generation ready to change the course of history.

Arlo Guthrie

#19. The most important thing about global warming is this. Whether humans are responsible for the bulk of climate change is going to be left to the scientists, but it's all of our responsibility to leave this planet in better shape for the future generations than we found it.

Mike Huckabee

#20. When our environment changes we change, and this combination of transformative deeds create a synergistic effect. Seemingly, insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes can eventfully lead to fundamental qualitative changes in the way a group of people function as a society.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#21. Like the other great revolutions, an environmental revolution will require sacrifices and lead to enormous gains. It, too, will change the face of the land and human institutions, hierarchies, self-definitions, cultures. It will take centuries. If it happens. There is no guarantee, of course.

Donella Meadows

#22. Our nation has abundant clean energy resources, and tapping them will generate jobs, make the air safer to breathe, and tackle climate change - the greatest environmental crisis of our time.

Frances Beinecke

#23. There's something very environmental about quality. We live in such a disposable society, but real style doesn't change that much.

Elizabeth Rogers

#24. This is an opportunity for the port and all of us to make a bold statement about how oil companies contribute to climate change, oil spills and other environmental disasters - and reject this short-term lease.

Ed Murray

#25. Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.

George Monbiot

#26. From year to year, environmental changes are incremental and often barely register in our lives, but from evolutionary or geological perspectives, what is happening is explosive change.

David Suzuki

#27. Failing to curb the impact of climate change could damage the global economy on the scale of the Great Depression or the world wars by spawning environmental devastation that could cost 5 to 20 percent of the world's annual gross domestic product.

Nicholas Stern

#28. Climate change is not an environmental problem. It is a civilizational problem. Climate change is not just another issue. If it is not addressed in very short order, it will swamp every other issue facing us today

Ross Gelbspan

#29. Life and the environment are one thing, not two, and people, as all life, are immersed in the one system. When we influence nature, we influence ourselves; when we change nature, we change ourselves.

Daniel Botkin

#30. Environment isn't asking us to conserve her for her but for our future generations.

Mohith Agadi

#31. It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.

David Attenborough

#32. All is connected ... no one thing can change by itself.

Paul Hawken

#33. We'll look for almost any reason not to change our attitudes; the inertia of the established order is powerful. If we can think of a plausible, or even implausible, reason to discount environmental warnings, we will.

Bill McKibben

#34. Climate change isn't just an environmental issue; it's a technology, water, food, energy, population issue. None of this happens in a vacuum.

David Titley

#35. We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places, in fact, are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically, the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods.

Freeman Dyson

#36. We all are travelers traveling on a very big spaceship called Earth. Let's not ruin the engines of our very own spaceship in the name of development.

Mohith Agadi

#37. The message snow gives us is very valuable: The environment you live in can suddenly change! Are you ready for this? Let us be thankful to the snow for this spectacular warning!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#38. Society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.

John C. Sawhill

#39. Unprecedented technological capabilities combined with unlimited human creativity have given us tremendous power to take on intractable problems like poverty, unemployment, disease, and environmental degradation. Our challenge is to translate this extraordinary potential into meaningful change.

Muhammad Yunus

#40. What's now urgently needed [to stop environmental disaster] is the international political commitment to take action to avoid dangerous climate change.

David Miliband

#41. I'm a filmmaker, I'm a storyteller, an entertainer, if you will, so what can I do to participate? Well, I'm not a scientist; I'm not an expert on environmental law; I'm a guy that can tell stories. So I always look for a way to communicate ideas and help to spread excitement for change.

Adrian Grenier

#42. To be clear, climate change is a true 800 pound gorilla in the room. The effects of global warming threaten global environmental upheaval over the coming century. But for South Florida and the Everglades, it could be our death knell if urgent action is not taken.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz

#43. Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technological civilisation makes up particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them [scientists] agree, the end of human life on earth is assured.

Werner Herzog

#44. Incredibly, oil and gas companies don't have to pay certain environmental costs that amount to small change to them, while an offshore wind project start-up is faced with fees that could mean the difference between building a wind farm and packing up and going home.

Chellie Pingree

#45. Clinton understands that climate change is real, is caused by human activity and is one of the great environmental crises facing our planet. She knows that we must transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and move aggressively to energy efficiency and sustainable energy.

Bernie Sanders

#46. Disease may be defined as 'A change produced in living things in consequence of which they are no longer in harmony with their environment.

William Thomas Councilman

#47. We have 20 years [until 2026] to reduce carbon emissions or climate change will become irreversible.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

#48. If the long arc of history bends toward social justice, it also bends toward environmental justice and ecological sanity.

David Jaber

#49. I have a conflict of interest in environmental conservation.

Mohith Agadi

#50. On almost every environmental issue I care about, in fact, I've been wrong at one point or another. I used to think that climate change was no big deal, that most environmental problems were massive exaggerations, that oil reserves were effectively unlimited, and more.

Ramez Naam

#51. The dialogue about sustainability is about a change in the human trajectory that will require us to rethink old assumptions and engage the large questions of the human condition that some presume to have been solved once and for all.

David W. Orr

#52. When people align around shared political, social, economic or environmental values, and take collective action, thinking and behavior that compromises the lives of millions of people around the world can truly change.

Simon Mainwaring

#53. We're gonna be using American produced, American energy that will create jobs in the United States, will create a far more secure source of energy for us and will make us better environmental stewards because we will be contributing less to climate change and burning much cleaner fuel.

Ray Mabus

#54. Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.

Bill Gates

#55. Successfully reframing the climate debate in the United States from one based on environmental values to one based on health values ... holds great promise to help American society better understand and appreciate the risks of climate change ...

George Mason

#56. Nevertheless, there is another threat on the horizon. I see this threat in environmentalism which is becoming a new dominant ideology, if not a religion. Its main weapon is raising the alarm and predicting the human life endangering climate change based on man-made global warming.

Vaclav Klaus

#57. Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.

James Lovelock

#58. If we deny climate change and don't care about environmental degradation; we are no more than those people who are willing to be stupid because someone else was stupid in the past.

M.F. Moonzajer

#59. I believe we should reframe our response to climate change as an imperative for growth rather than merely being a way of being green or meeting environmental commitments.

William Hague

#60. I would point out that if you're a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn't because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.

Joe Barton

#61. I didn't want to hear the usual answers about what's wrong because I believe these are symptoms: global warming, genocide, hunger, poverty, war, environmental crisis. If we can identify the root cause, we can change our ways.

Tom Shadyac

#62. The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.

Barry Commoner

#63. Sustainability at Nike means being laser-focused on evolving our business model to deliver profitable growth while leveraging the efficiencies of lean manufacturing, minimizing our environmental impact and using the tools available to us to bring about positive change across our entire supply chain.

Mark Parker

#64. Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.

Dan Lipinski

#65. Politics colours everything, and anyone who wants change is necessarily political. As an environmental campaigner more or less since I left school in the early '90s, I have always been involved in lobbying, campaigning and pushing for changes.

Zac Goldsmith

#66. It's not enough simply to wear the badge of corporate responsibility. Business must accept that real change is the only response to climate change and other environmental crises

Jonathon Porritt

#67. The single greatest issue for me as an environmentalist is climate change. I'd have to say that climate change is the single most important issue facing the environmental community and communities as a whole.

Jerome Ringo

#68. Public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation - not just with climate change but with a host of health, environmental and societal threats. The implications for the planet are grim.

Michael E. Mann

#69. I have long understood that climate change is not only an environmental issue - it is a humanitarian, economic, health, and justice issue as well.

Frances Beinecke

#70. The contrast between genetic and environmental, between nature and nurture, is not a contrast between fixed and changeable. It is a fallacy of biological determinism to say that if differences are in the genes, no change can occur.

Richard C. Lewontin

#71. It is environmental illiteracy and a complete lack of forward thinking to ignore the need to halt and then reverse population growth in the context of climate change, travel congestion, unaffordable housing, and resource depletion

Phil Harding

#72. Diagnosing and labeling people whose struggles are more environmental or learned than genetic or organic is often far more detrimental to healing and change than it is helpful.

Brene Brown

#73. What are we individually doing to join effects to combat climate change?

Lailah Gifty Akita

#74. Truly, we do live on a 'water planet.' For us, water is that critical issue that we need. It's the most precious substance on the planet, and it links us to pretty much every environmental issue, including climate change, that we're facing.

Philippe Cousteau Jr.

#75. Climate change is the central environmental ill of our time. We have an obligation to protect our children from the dangers of this widening scourge, and we aren't yet doing enough about it.

Frances Beinecke

#76. Many environmental battles are won by delaying a destructive project long enough to change the conversation - to allow new economic, political and social dynamics to emerge.

Frances Beinecke

#77. Our overriding environmental challenge tonight is the worldwide problem of climate change, global warming, the gathering crisis that requires worldwide action.

William J. Clinton

#78. We loved our homeland for thousands of years which cost us climate change and environmental degradation because we were too selfish to care about the nature, now it is time that we must love our world at least for a little time.

M.F. Moonzajer

#79. Real change will only happen when we fall in love with our planet. Only love can show us how to live in harmony with nature and with each other and save us from the devastating effects of environmental destruction and climate change

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

#80. Today, the UK must be the pioneer of a new model of economic change, that integrates social and environmental consideration. This is not just a question of values and moral duty. It is about our economy's capacity to sustain itself

David Miliband

#81. Climate change is the world's greatest environmental challenge. It is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and economic growth ... is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable.

Tony Blair

#82. You become what you do. How and what you become depends on environmental influence so you become who you hang around. Raise the standard your peers must meet and you'll raise your expectations of yourself. If your environment is not making you better, change it.

Mark Twight

#83. What is the environmental policy of the Republican Party? When I ask that question, I get a blank stare, if I'm president of the United States, we're going to address climate change and CO2 emissions in a business-friendly way.

Lindsey Graham