Important Quotes

These quotes were gathered from many reliable sources.
They are offered as tools to use in whatever way you chose
to participate in the good work of righting what we know is wrong.
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"In Our Every Deliberation, We Must Consider the Impact of Our Decisions on the next Seven Generations."

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The element carbon has become one of the largest waste products of modern civilization. During 1988, some 5.66 billion tons were produced by the combustion of fossil fuels - more than a ton for each human being. Another 1 to 2 billion tons were released by felling and burning forests. Each ton of carbon emitted into the air results in 3.7 tons of carbon dioxide (co2). Thus, at least 24 billion tons of co2 entered the atmosphere from these processes in 1988 alone.
United States, is by far the most carbon intensive country in the world. With less than 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. causes 24 percent of the world's carbon emissions, at more than 5 tons of carbon (18.5 tons of co2) per person, compared to the United Kingdom at 2.73 tons carbon per person, Italy at 1.78, France 1.7, Mexico 0.96, China 0.56, Indonesia 0.16.

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United States emitted almost 1.5 billion tons of carbon (5.2 billion tons of co2) in 1995 from fossil-fuel burning, gas flaring and cement manufacturing, 5.6 tons of carbon (20.7 tons co2) per U.S. resident.

During the first half of 1991, tankers spilled 450,000 tons (110 million gallons) around the world, 10 times the amount spilled by Exxon Valdex in Alaska.
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The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska is estimated to contain roughly 3.2 billion barrels of oil, approximately the amount the U.S. consumes in 6 months.
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Transportation consumes 63% of total oil used in the U.S.
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"The total energy consumed by U.S. agriculture per year is equivalent to more than 30 billion gallons of gasoline (714,285,000 barrels). This represents more than 5x the energy content of the food produced."

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"292 million barrels of oil per year are used to make chemical fertilizers, while millions of tons of manure from cows, poultry and swine are left to pollute the nations groundwater and surface waters."
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Price supports, soil-bank arrangements, direct payments, export controls, research-and-development funds, disaster-assistance payments, marketing agreements, tax write-offs - all have been designed to work chiefly to the benefit of the largest, usually corporate, farmers. The Farmers Home Administration underwrites loans every year overwhelmingly for chemical-based, machine-intensive, monocultural, large-scale farms, thus setting the pattern for local banks and credit institutions, and also for equipment and chemical suppliers. And because federal funds have accounted one way or another for between 20 and 40 percent of all farm income since 1955 - easily the largest single income - what the Federal government does is the single greatest element determining the character of American agriculture.

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Like high-input agriculture, genetic engineering is often justified as a humane technology, one that feeds more people with better food. In both cases, nothing could be further from the truth.
Monsanto has patented cotton seed containing genes for Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis). Advertised as being effective against bollworms without the use of additional pesticides, 1,800,000 acres in five southern states were planted with this transgenic seed in 1996, at a cost to the farmers of not only the seed itself but an additional $32-per-acre "technology fee" paid to Monsanto. Heavy bollworm infestation occurred in spite of the special seed, forcing farmers to spray expensive insecticides anyway. Those farmers who wanted to use the seeds from surviving plants to replace the damaged crop found that Monsanto's licensing agreement, like most others in the industry, permitted them only one planting.
Monsanto also manufactures rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone) which is injected into lactating cows to make them yield more milk. This is done despite our nation's milk glut and despite the fact that rBGH will probably accelerate the demise of the small dairy farm, since only large farms are able to take on the extra debt for the more expensive feeds, high-tech feed-management systems, and the added veterinary care that go along with its use. The substance causes cows to suffer many problems: bloat, diarrhea, diseases of the feet and knees, feeding disorders, fevers, reduced hemoglobin levels, cystic ovaries, uterine pathology, reduced pregnancy rates, smaller calves, and, most common of all, mastitis. Cows treated with rBGH require more antibiotics, which can transmit to the milk, and which then accelerate the antibiotic resistance among bacteria that cause human disease.

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The U.S. National Research Council (NRC) estimates that no information on toxic effects is available for 79 percent of the more than 48,500 chemicals listed in EPA's inventory of toxic substances. Fewer than a fifth have been tested for acute effects, and fewer than a tenth for chronic (for example, cancer-causing), reproductive, or mutagenic effects. Pesticides are purposefully designed to alter or kill living organisms, and they have generally received more extensive testing, but there, too, serious gaps remain.
Between 400,000 and 2 million pesticide poisonings occur worldwide each year, most of them among farmers in developing countries. The 10,000 to 40,000 such poisonings that are thought to result in death each year dwarf the 2000 deaths caused by the toxic gas leak at the pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India.
While an entrenched agrochemicals industry continues to propound the virtues and necessity of reliance on pesticides, the facts cry out for new solutions to pest problems.
As of 1984, USDA had supervised non-toxic IPM (Integrated Pest Management) on 40 different crops, collectively covering 11 million hectares. Farmers have benefited economically. For instance, a Texas farmer had net returns per hectare averaging $282 higher than other cotton farmers. Apple growers in New York and almond growers in California, using IPM techniques, had per-hectare profits $528 and $769 greater, respectively, than nonusers.

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"Without the modern inputs of chemicals, pesticides, antibiotics, herbicides we simply could not do the job of feeding America. Before we go back to organic agriculture in this country, somebody must decide which 50 million Americans we are going to let starve or go hungry."

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CHEMICALS LEFT AS RESIDUES ON FOOD CROPS:
ON APPLES: Benomyl, Captafol, Captan, Chlordimeform, Daminozide, Dicofol, Dinoseb, Folpet, Lead Arsenate, Mancozeb, Maneb, Methomyl, Metiram, O-Phenylphenol, Permethrin, Phosmet, Pronamide, Silvex, Simazine, Toxaphene, Zineb.
ON TOMATOES: Benomyl, Calcium Arsenate, Captafol, Captan, Chlorimeform, Chlorothalonil, Daminozide, DDVP, Dicofol, Folpet, Heptachlor, Lead Arsenate, Mancozeb, Methomyl, Metiram, O-Phenylphenol, Parathion, Permethrin, Phosmet, Toxaphene, Zineb.
From: "A Study of Carcinogenic Pesticides Allowed in Sixteen Foods and Found in Water: Guess What's Coming to Dinner", by Hind and Spink, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Washington, D.C. 1989.

"U.S. industry generates about 90 billion pounds of hazardous wastes yearly. Less than 10% is disposed of safely."

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Love Canal, on the Niagara river, became a symbol of the problem of hazardous waste dumps in the United States. The four largest dumps hold enough hazardous wastes to fill 10,000 tanker trucks.
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An EPA study completed in the early eighties found that more than 70 percent of the 80,000 pits, ponds and lagoons containing hazardous chemicals did not have liners to guard against seepage. The geologic settings of nearly half the sites were such that any seepage that did occur would quickly reach the groundwater. All factors considered, 72,000 impoundments - 90 percent of the total - are thought to pose a threat of groundwater contamination.
The clean-up of some 10,000 toxic waste sites in the U.S. is estimated to cost over $100 billion dollars, roughly $400 for every U.S. resident.

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Approximately 65 percent of North America's uranium deposits lie inside Native American reservation. But these reservations have been home to 80 percent of all uranium mining and 100 percent of the processing, largely because reservations fall outside the jurisdiction of most state and federal environmental laws, and reservation residents have no authority to make their own protective regulations.
With such large reserves of the valuable ore, and given the federal government's historical commitment to nuclear development, many Native American communities should by now have become quite wealthy. But thanks largely to federal land managers, whose goal was to provide preferred companies with the cheapest possible exploitation rights, Native Americans have tended to receive as little as 3.4 percent of the market value for uranium extracted from their lands. Native Americans also have the lowest per capita income of any demographic group in America and the highest per capita rate of malnutrition, disease, and infant mortality.
The Navajo community in particular has suffered from cancer, respiratory ailmants, miscarriages and birth defects caused by radiation. In almost all cases, the people who worked in the mines never received protective clothing or medical checkups or even basic information about the risks of exposure to uranium, and virtually no victims have ever gained any type of compensation. To this day, many Native American communities have to live with illegally high levels of lead, thorium, radium and other toxins that have seeped into their water and soil from tailings ponds and processig plants.

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In 1990 Australians experienced a 20% increase in UV radiation, and had the world's highest rate of skin cancer. In Queensland, more than 75% of people who had reached the age of 65 had some form of skin cancer.
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"At the turn of the century, when I entered the Army, the target was one enemy casualty at the end of a sword or rifle or bayonet. Then came the machine gun, designed to kill by the dozen. After that, the heavy artillery, raining death by the hundreds. Then the aerial bomb, to strike by the thousands, followed by the atom explosion to reach the hundreds of thousands. Now, electronics and other processes of the sciences have raised the destructive potential to encompass millions. And with restless brains they work feverishly in dark labs to find the means to destroy all at one blow."

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In the United States, about 70 percent of all public R&D (Research and Development) outlays goes to the military. In Israel, about the same, in France about 30 percent, in Italy, Canada and Argentina about 8 percent.

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In the 90's, children's TV shows contained an average of 26 acts of violence per hour, up from 18 acts of violence in the 80's.
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The U.S. military budget is roughly $350 billion per year (this was back around 1997), more than one trillion dollars for three years. To put this into a perspective that our minds can grasp I offer the following quote found by William Sloane Coffin in an airline magazine:
"Let's talk a trillion. For one trillion dollars, you could build a $75,000 house, place it on $5,000 worth of land, furnish it with $10,000 worth of furniture, put a $10,000 car in the garage and give all this to each and every family in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado and Iowa. Having done this, you would still have enough left to build a $10 million hospital and a $10 million library in each of 250 cities and towns throughout the six-state region. After having done all that, you would still have enough money left to build 500 schools at $10 million each for the communities in the region, and after having done all that you would still have enough left from the original trillion to put aside, at 10% annual interest, a sum of money that would pay a salary of $25,000 per year for an army of 10,000 nurses, the same salary for an army of 10,000 teachers, and an annual cash allowance of $5000 for each and every family throughout the six-state region - not just for one year, but forever.
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"....the principal threat to our future come less from the relationship of nation to nation, more from the relationship between ourselves and the natural systems on which we depend."

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In the Philippines, 39 children filed a lawsuit calling on the environment minister to cancel all timber licenses. The youngsters said they were acting on behalf of their own generation and those in the future. 37 million acres of virgin forest had already been destroyed, leaving only 2.1 million standing. Devastation of the same magnitude is happening in Russia, in the northwest and northeast USA, in Sweden, as well as in Africa, South America and New Guinea.
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"Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has become the contamination of man's total environment with substances of incredible potential harm - substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends."

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"So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months. Most of the amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction about the same time. Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and with them the physical structure of most of the forests and other terrestrial habitats of the world."

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"If we do not change the direction we are going, we are likely to end up where we are headed."

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"Some of the changes needed will be relatively simple to implement. Others will be more difficult. But all will require the courage to see things as they are, to avoid deceiving ourselves, to train ourselves to recognize when sophisticated imbecilities are substituted for serious analysis."
"Typically, we cite hugely inflated estimates of the expense involved in changing our current policies, with no analysis whatsoever of the expense associated with the impact of the changes that will occur if we do nothing."
"When future generations wonder how we could go along with our daily routines in silent complicity with collective destruction of the earth, will we, like the Unfaithful Servant, claim that we did not notice these things because we were morally asleep?

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"Have we fallen into a mezmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?"

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A sustainable society is one that satisfies its needs without jeopordizing the prospects of future generations.

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If we want to realize the American Dream we must first wake up.
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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The darker the epoch in which we live, the more we must love it, penetrate it with our love, until we have displaced the heavy matter standing in the way of the light which shines from the other side."

Walter Rathenau

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The truth shall set us free.
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Go within to find out.
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"Go placidly among the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly, and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, for they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."

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"Never before have the potentials for humanity been so great, nor have the dangers ever been so extreme."

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"Whatever you do may seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."

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