Environmental History Quotes

“It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones…Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow’s fall”
― Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

“Contemporary attitudes toward urban parks fall into three levels of sophistication. The first, the most naive assumption, is that parks are just plots of land preserved in their original state. If asked to discuss the issue at all, many laymen have maintained this much, that parks are bits of nature created only in the sense that some decision was made not to build on the land. Many are surprised to learn that parks that an artifact conceived and deliberated as carefully as public buildings, with both physical shape and social usage taken into account. The second, a little more informed, is that parks are aesthetic objects and that their history can be understood in terms of an evolution of artistic styles independent of societal considerations. The third is the view that each of the elements of the urban park represents part of planners' strategy for moral and social reform, so that today, as in the past, the citizen visiting a park is subject to an accumulated set of intended moral lessons.”
― Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America

“We stood by and allowed what happened to the Great Plains a century ago, the destruction of one of the ecological wonders of the world. In modern America, we need to see this with clear eyes, and soberly, so that we understand well that the flyover country of our own time derives much of its forgettability from being a slate wiped almost clean of its original figures.”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

“We trust ourselves, far more than our ancestors did… The root of our predicament lies in the simple fact that, though we remain a flawed and unstable species, plagued now as in the past by a thousand weaknesses, we have insisted on both unlimited freedom and unlimited power. It would now seem clear that, if we want to stop the devastation of the earth, the growing threats to our food, water, air, and fellow creatures, we must find some way to limit both.”
― Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West

“The United States inherited a seemingly inexhaustible fortune in natural resources, yet it has responded to its environment with a dismaying mixture of materialism and inertia. The nation was virtually founded upon a ubiquitous desire for access to land and its contents. Its amazing growth during the nineteenth century was based directly upon the exploitation—immediate, unplanned, full use of soils, minerals, forests, and rivers. Equitable access to these natural bounties rather than constitutional guarantees would be the practical basis for democracy. Subsequently, political institutions were shaped in such a way that they could facilitate the disposition of the public domain. But that expectation, as later generations ruefully observed, did not materialize. The combination of economics and government had instead produced a handful of owners and policy makers who were beyond the control of the ballot box.”
― Elmo Richardson, Dams, parks & politics;: Resource development & preservation in the Truman-Eisenhower era

“We must experience Heaven on earth;
May your homes, surroundings and work places portray a safe clean environment.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

“The marketplace is an institution that teaches self-advancement, private acquisition, and the domination of nature. Its way of thinking is incompatible with the round river. Ecological harmony is a nonmarket value that takes a collective will to achieve.”
― Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination

“Why did we so consistently look at the West through the sights of a rifle?”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

“[T]he people of plenty were a people of waste.”
― William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

“Born of antimodern sentiment, the summer camp was ultimately a modern phenomenon, a "therapeutic space" as much dependent on the city, the factory, and "progress" to define its parameters as on that intangible but much lauded entity called nature. In short, the summer camp should best be read not as a simple rejection of modern life, but, rather, as one of the complex negotiations of modernity taking place in mid-twentieth century Canada.”
― Sharon Wall, The Nurture of Nature: Childhood, Antimodernism, and Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-55

“Nothing can ever fix nature' not even all monies in the world and money rules, are never worthy following.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“I have every expectation that cancer will become known as the disease of human evolution trying and failing to adapt to a significantly changed environment.”
― Steven Magee

“It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature...scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the same of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere support of a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary...”
― John Stuart Mills

“In fact, the advocates of People's Park had asserted another version of what is probably America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: a daily reality of harmony between man and nature based on an experience of the land land as essentially feminine - that is not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification - enclosing the individual in an environment of receptivity, repose, and painless and integral satisfaction.”
― Annette Kolodny, Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters

“A dam tears at all the interconnected webs of river valley life.”
― Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams

“Resources, waterways, and climatic zones loom so large in their writings that one can almost forget that people have something to do with the building of cities.”
― William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

“During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a practical knowledge of the construction of small lakes was part of the equipment of most countrymen. Many of the holes they dug and dams they built still hold water and are now often regarded as 'natural.' They are of immeasurable value in the landscape.”
― Elisabeth Beazley, Designed for recreation: A practical handbook for all concerned with providing leisure facilities in the countryside;

“Underlying many aspects of water development is a myth: the myth that we must have more.”
― Tim Palmer, Endangered Rivers and the Conservation Movement

“In the 1940s dams were synonymous with progress, and the rivers were to be conquered with the fervour of a pioneer wielding an axe.”
― Tim Palmer, Endangered Rivers and the Conservation Movement

“By what peculiar twist of perception, I wondered, had I managed to see the plowed fields and second-growth forests of southern Wisconsin—a landscape of former prairies now long vanished—as somehow more “natural” than the streets, buildings, and parks of Chicago? All represented drastic human alterations of earlier landscapes.”
― William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

“Environmental history is, among other things, a lengthy account of human beings over and over imagining their way into a serious pickle.”
― Elliot West

“Environmental history is, among other things, a lengthy account of human beings over and over imagining their way into a serious pickle.”
― Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado

“In the largest sense, the preservation/sagebrush processes outlined in this story are driven by three basic components of American culture: land ownership, independence, and individualism.”
― William L. Graf, Wilderness Preservation and the Sagebrush Rebellions

“Reefs, [Charlie Vernon] points out, are nature's archives and historians. They are complex data banks that record evidence of environmental changes from millions of years ago up to the present.”
― Iain McCalman, The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change