Deforestation Quotes

“These folk are hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore we are their unfriends, and if they will not depart we shall afflict them in all ways that we can.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“We need to save the forests. I have a big warehouse we can store them in.”
― Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic

“Trees, how many of 'em do we need to look at?”
― Ronald Reagan

“Ethiopia is the center of origin and diversity for the majority of coffee we drink. The commodification of coffee pushes farmers to grow as much as possible by whatever means possible. This has contributed to deforestation. The place where coffee was born - the area with the greatest biodiversity of coffee anywhere in the world - could disappear. No forest, no coffee. No coffee, no forest. What we lose isn't specific to Ethiopia; it impacts us all.”
― Preeti Simran Sethi, Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love

“Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut--hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs--products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"--as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees.”
― David James Duncan, The River Why

“It gets me thinking about the history of this land, of this whole world, even. How someone got it in their head that ripping down thousand-year-old trees was a-okay. How people who grow gardens are crunchy; how people who grow their stock portfolios are sophisticated. How Tenn’s mom’s land, with its birdsong and dappled light and ancient mushrooms, will be destroyed in just a few days because a few rich people want more money and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”
― Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, Witch of Wild Things

“Will carpenters become the farmers of tomorrow when all of the trees are no more?”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“walking in the Cambrian Desert, it sometimes seems impossible to imagine trees returning there, the emptiness stands as an incontestable fact, as if it were a matter of geology, not ecology”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“Exploiting nature has no real benefits; only irreversible consequences.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Burn Like Fire

“Mother Earth is a living organism, forests are the lungs of the planet, soil is the womb, oceans are blood - climate change is the planet having fever, in response to the human virus.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Blink!
And you will miss the forest.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style

“Maybe they are running out of land for themselves…Forests cut down by the thousands. Conquests. New Kingdoms. Shifting cultivation. In the world we men have made, there is no room for them…or for that matter, us”
― Gourav Mohanty, Sons of Darkness

“Hallucination Country by Stewart Stafford

A furious tribe of leaves,
Chased a logging truck,
As forked flames waved,
From a burning backyard tree.

A half-eaten unicorn in a ditch,
A warning from hunters nearby,
Slaughtering fairytale creatures,
Cryptids were their mint targets.

An abandoned Volkswagen car lay,
Half-overturned, underbelly exposed,
The injured driver, now hitchhiking,
With a spree killer or tow-truck driver.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“In general, the well-off have the money to outsource their deforesting as they buy food and other commodities grown by clearing land in other countries. As we have seen, they don’t stop deforesting, they just do it somewhere far from home.”
― Fred Pearce, A Trillion Trees: How We Can Reforest Our World

“We see the climate changing every day. In the past, everything was in time but these days, it’s out of time and it’s affecting everything and everyone. We must work with nature and not against it.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya, Our Nepal, Our Pride

“Every summer, news broadcasts are full of reports of devastating fires.All this would make me immensely frustrated at the people who didn't care about Mother Nature, especially those destroying it in the name of greed.”
― Anna LeMind, The Power of Misfits: How to Find Your Place in a World You Don’t Fit In

“Human beings go on living as if they own the whole world. There are two misconceptions that humans hold, which constitute the major portion of all the wrongs that they do. First is that the Earth belongs to humans and the second is that humans belong to Earth.”
― Shivanshu K. Srivastava

“As increasing human population and fires from the savannah are continuously eating into the forest belt, it seems likely that the distribution of the forest members of the fusca group will continue to retract. In 1912 Simpson described how G. Fusca was found in Sierra Leone along a certain 37-mile stretch of road which ran through thickly wooded country skirting mountains densely clothed in thick forest; in 1946 I visited the area to find no fusca, but bare mountains, grassland, and only a few patches of low secondary thicket.”
― T. A. M Nash, Africa's bane: the tsetse fly

“This was the sound of strength. The sound of men shaping the land and cutting down pagan idols. Soon the trees would be gone, and the bare hills would be crawling with civilization. Avram was the sharp point of that progress. The blade that felled. The arm that moved.”
― Marcel M. du Plessis, The Doom of Balar

“Cut down no trees, for they are home to the birds you adore.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Pour Like Rain

“The greatest evil the world has ever done is killing nature after consuming from its generous hands.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Pour Like Rain

“China has gone on a logging orgy outside its borders, often illegally, to procure logs from Indonesia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, and Siberia. And now Chinese logging firms are moving into the Amazon and Congo Basin.”
― Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

“Forest losses from clearing land for farming and ranching, usually by burning, are concentrated in the Brazilian Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Borneo.”
― Lester R. Brown, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization

“Earth Engineer (Sonnet 2336)

Earth has abundant resources to suffice our need,
but no planet has enough to suffice our greed.
Earth is rich, earth is bountiful, like a doting
mother, she provides for all her kids.

There is no economic depression,
only addiction of power and money.
There is no population explosion,
only outbreak of egocentricity.

What's the point of your architecture or engineering
degree, if you can't build a human habitat without
destroying entire ecosystems of other living things!
And you call yourself an engineer, an architect -
a sparrow has more sense than a stupid earthling.

Reach for the stars all you want,
but anchor your soul in the soil.
Human blood deficient of salt from earth,
leads to a history of mental turmoil.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“What's the point of your architecture or engineering degree, if you can't build a human habitat without destroying entire ecosystems of other living things!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“What's the point of your architecture or engineering degree, if you can't build a human habitat without destroying entire ecosystems of other living things! And you call yourself an engineer, an architect - a sparrow has more sense than a stupid earthling.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“I'm not a vegetarian, I could eat anything if it's well cooked and tastes good, but preservation of wildlife is nonnegotiable, because it is only by preserving biodiversity, that we ensure a sustainable planet for humanity. It is one thing to consume animals for food, and another to destroy entire ecosystems for profit. There is nothing wrong in development, but development founded on destruction of nature, is the most expensive ticket to human extinction.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Wipe out America, Peace will flourish.
Wipe out the Humans, Nature will flourish.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“The Human Virus (Climate Summon)

Mother Earth is a living organism,
forests are the lungs of the planet,
soil is the womb, oceans are blood -
climate change is the planet having fever,
in response to the human virus.

Economy rooted in greed is not growth,
religion rooted in dogma is not holy,
innovation rooted in vanity is not science,
abundance without wholeness ruins the society.

Earth doesn't need our consent to wipe us out,
any more than we asked permission from corona virus.
Cosmos carries no fury like a mother done wrong -
Mother brings us into the world, mother can take us out.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop