“We need to feed our planet, of course. But we also need the teeny creatures that drive all life on earth. There’s something strange about a farm that intentionally creates a biological desert to produce food for one species: us. It’s efficient, yes. But it’s so efficient that the ants are missing, the bees are missing, and even the birds stay away. Something’s not right here. Our cornfields are too quiet.”

Robert Krulwich

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“Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.”

Jim Robbins

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“A spring heat wave like no other in U.S. and Canadian history peaked in intensity yesterday, during its tenth day. Since record keeping began in the late 1800s, there have never been so many temperature records broken for spring warmth in a one-week period—and the margins by which some of the records were broken yesterday were truly astonishing. Wunderground’s weather historian, Christopher C. Burt, commented to me yesterday, ‘It’s almost like science fiction at this point.'”

Jeff Masters

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“The earth is full.”

Paul Gilding

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“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees. If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the earth’s CO₂ blanket, the earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation, this is high school science.”

Paul Gilding

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“In spite of the string of magazine covers announcing the contrary, we all know that ten simple things will not save the earth. There are, rather, three thousand impossible things that all of us must do, and changing our light bulbs, while necessary, is the barest beginning. We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to define out individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.”

Lyanda Lynn Haupt

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“When our leaders take these anti-science positions, or when they happily plead ignorance about some of the most important issues of our time—our energy use, global warming, genomics, all the revolutions unleashed by computer science—they’re not just being anti-intellectual. They’re also being un-American. The people who founded this country were serious science geeks. We should be celebrating this fact, not running away from it.”

Steven Johnson

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“Oil companies and other interested parties occasionally try to start a debate by making claims that are clearly and criminally fallacious, on the grounds that we might believe there’s an element of doubt, or that the truth lies somewhere in between, but really there’s nothing to argue about. Climate change is happening now, and it will be devastating, unless unimaginably enormous steps are taken by everyone, immediately.”

Nick Hornby

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“To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person’s intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings.”

Wendell Berry

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“What will the city look like over the next 200 years? Maybe we can start to think of all those backyards and roofs as sponges, as a permeable landscape. Over the course of 200 years, our infrastructure will be built piece by piece, block by block, community by community. That’s very different from 1811, when you could just bulldoze the land.”

Joel Towers

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“Sustainability is when if you keep doing what you’re doing you’ll be able to keep doing what you’re doing.”

Carol Venolia

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“I don’t want to talk about me, of course, but it seems as though far too much attention has been lavished on you lately—that your greed and vanities and quest for self-fulfillment have been catered to far too much. You just want and want and want. You believe in yourself excessively. You don’t believe in Nature anymore. It’s too isolated from you. You’ve abstracted it. It’s so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life’s highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.”

Joy Williams

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“I aim for appropriate self-reliance, not for independence. Independence is for Neanderthals.”

Carol Deppe

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“According to [chef] Julian Serrano, it is easier to get good ingredients in Las Vegas than in San Francisco, where he used to work, because the airport there often gets fogged in, whereas in Las Vegas the weather is almost always clear, and a plane lands every three minutes at McCarran Field.”

Dana Goodyear

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“What will happen to us when our children have no connection with what is wild in the land, its depth, danger, generosity? What will life be like for children who do not grow up paying close attention to it and testing themselves against it? And what will happen to those children who ache for it, as I did, but cannot find it anywhere?”

Susan Hand Shetterly

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