Carl Sagan
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Rachel Carson
Undersea (1934)
Who has known the ocean?” she asked. “Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses, know the foam and surge of the tide that beats over the crab hiding under the seaweed of his tide-pool home; or the lilt of the long, slow swells of mid-ocean, where shoals of wandering fish prey and are preyed upon, and the dolphin breaks the waves to breathe the upper atmosphere.
Frederick Law Olmsted
Report on the Management of Yosemite (1865)
If we analyze the operations of scenes of beauty upon the mind, and consider the intimate relation of the mind upon the nervous system and the whole physical economy…The enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it; tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigoration to the whole system.
Aldo Leopold
The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac (1949)
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Wendell Berry
The Long-Legged House (1969)
A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.
J. Drew Lanham
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature (2017)
To help others understand nature is to make it breathe like some giant: a revolving, evolving, celestial being with ecosystems acting as organs and the living things within those places—humans included—as cells vital to its survival.
Lois Marie Gibbs
Love Canal and the Birth of the Environmental Health Movement (1982)
Average people and the average community can change the world. You can do it just based on common sense, determination, persistence and patience.
Jane Jacobs
The Life and Death of Great American Cities (1961)
Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Massey Lecture #5: "A Christmas Sermon on Peace," delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church
(1967)
"It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world?" .... "This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality."