We are nothing without our environment, and these quotes touch on some interesting viewpoints about that.

1. If we each take responsibility in shifting our own behavior, we can trigger the type of change that is necessary to achieve sustainability for our race or this planet. We change our planet, our environment, our humanity every day, every year, every decade, and every millennia. –Yehuda Berg

2. Today we’re dumping 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the environment, and tomorrow we will dump more, and there is no effective worldwide response. Until we start sharply reducing global-warming pollution, I will feel that I have failed. –Al Gore

3. We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment. –Margaret Mead

4. Everything we think about regarding sustainability – from energy to agriculture to manufacturing to population – has a water footprint. Almost all of the water on Earth is salt water, and the remaining freshwater supplies are split between agricultural use and human use – as well as maintaining the existing natural environment. –Jamais Cascio

5. When you take on something like your footprint on the environment, you have to say, ‘Where am I going to draw the circle around my level of responsibility and then where do I assume that others will take responsibility?’ –Sally Jewell

6. On the environment and climate change, I suspect that future generations will think there was too much timidity, too much fear of upsetting business. Basically, New Labour was very nervous about regulating business, or requiring it to do anything, even when there was a very clear social or environmental case for doing so. –Geoff Mulgan

7. We may overcompensate for our feelings of powerlessness by attempting to control and manipulate other people and our environment. Or we may eventually burst forth with uncontrolled rage that is highly exaggerated and distorted by its long suppression. –Shakti Gawain

8. ‘Green’ issues at last are attracting serious attention, owing to critically important links between the environment and the economy, health, and our security. –Sylvia Earle

9. Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out. –Octavio Paz

10. If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. –E. O. Wilson

11. If we’re destroying our trees and destroying our environment and hurting animals and hurting one another and all that stuff, there’s got to be a very powerful energy to fight that. I think we need more love in the world. We need more kindness, more compassion, more joy, more laughter. I definitely want to contribute to that. –Ellen DeGeneres