7 quotes
Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important, simply because of his new-found power to destroy it.
Speech at Scripps College (1962)
Measured against the vast backdrop of geologic time, the whole era of man seems but a moment-but how portentous a moment!
Speech at Scripps College (1962)
What we are today represents an adjustment achieved over the millions and hundreds of millions of years.
Speech at Scripps College (1962)
Our streams are fouled with an incredible assortment of wastes-domestic, chemical, radioactive, so that our planet, though dominated by seas that envelop three-fourths of its surface, is rapidly becoming a thirsty world.
Speech at Scripps College (1962)
This is an age that has produced floods of how-to-do-it books, and it is also an age of how-to-do-it science. It is, in other words, the age of technology, in which if we know how to do something, we do it without pausing to inquire whether we should.
Speech at Scripps College (1962)
Poets often have a perception that gives their words the validity of science. So the English poet Francis Thompson said nearly a century ago, ‘Thou canst not stir a flower/Without troubling of a star.’ But the poet's insight has not become part of general knowledge.
Speech at Scripps College (1962)
In the western world our thinking has for many centuries been dominated by the Jewish-Christian concept of man's relation to nature, in which man is regarded as the master of all the earth's inhabitants. Out of this there easily grew the thought that everything on earth-animate or inanimate, animal, vegetable, or mineral-and indeed the earth itself-had been created expressly for man.
Speech at Scripps College (1962)