Charlotte Reconnecting Ourselves With Nature
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Our Favorite Quotes
​​

Whether speaking one-on-one or to a group, having a special quote​ can often help you drive home your message. 
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“Imagine a treatment that would improve your mood, make you smarter, keep you healthier and improve your relationships.  How much would you invest in that therapy?  Turns out, there is such a thing and best of all, it’s free. It’s called Nature.”   
~Dr. Lawrence Rosen

"May the relationship between man and nature not be driven by greed, to manipulate and exploit, but may the divine harmony between beings and creation be conserved in the logic of respect and care.”
​​ Pope Francis, Vatican City, April 22, 2015

"The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it"
~Robert Swan


"Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life."  
~Rachel Carson

"You will find something more in woods than in books.  Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters."  
~St. Bernard

"I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order."
 ~John Burroughs

"We have forgotten how to be good guests, how to walk lightly on the earth as its other
​ creatures do."    
~Barbara Ward

"Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty." 
~John Ruskin

"Source Reduction is to garbage what preventive medicine is to health."  
~William L. Rathje

"An environment-based education movement--at all levels of education--will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world."     
~Richard Louv

"The Truly Healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating."   
~William H. Stewart

"For many of us, water simply flows from a faucet, and we think little about it beyond this point of contact. We have lost a sense of respect for the wild river, for the complex workings of a wetland, for the intricate web of life that water supports."   
~Sandra Postel

"A Healthy Ecology is the Basis for a Healthy Economy"   
~Claudine Schneider

"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself."   
~ Rachel Carson

“Passion is lifted from the earth itself by the muddy hands of the young; it travels along grass-stained sleeves to the heart. If we are going to save environmentalism and the environment, we must also save an endangered indicator species: the child in nature.”  
~Richard Louv


"The Wilderness and the idea of wilderness is one of the permanent homes of the human spirit."  
 ~Joseph Wood Krutch

"To halt the decline of an ecosystem, it is necessary to think like an ecosystem."   
~Douglas P. Wheeler

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed."
~Mohandas K. Gandhi

"The ultimate test of man's conscience may be his willingness to sacrifice something today for future generations whose words of thanks will not be heard."   
~Gaylord Nelson

"Progress does not have to be patented to be worthwhile. Progress can also be measured by our interactions with nature and its preservation. Can we teach children to look at a flower and see all the things it represents: beauty, the health of an ecosystem, and the potential for healing? "    
~Richard Louv

"It is our collective and individual responsibility to protect and nurture the global family, to support its weaker members and to preserve and tend to the environment in which we all live."  
~Dalai Lama

"The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe, the less taste we shall have for destruction."     
~Rachel Carson

"Never a day passes but that I do myself the honor to commune with some of natures varied forms."
 ~George Washington Carver

"For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver."   
~Martin Luther

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"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts."
~ Rachel Carson

"As strenuous challenge or contemplative retreat, the parks and other units of the national lands offer welcome respite from the world, a safety valve for body and spirit."   
~T.H. Watkins

"Environment-based education produces student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math; improves standardized test scores and grade-point averages; and develops skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making."

~Richard Louv

"If we human beings learn to see the intricacies that bind one part of a natural system to another and then to us, we will no longer argue about the importance of wilderness protection, or over the question of saving endangered species, or how human communities must base their economic futures – not  on short-term exploitation – but on long-term, sustainable development."   
~Gaylord Nelson

"I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us."
~Theodore Roosevelt

"So bleak is the picture... that the bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century."  
~Philip Shabecoff

"The scarcest resource is not oil, metals, clean air, capital, labour, or technology. It is our willingness to listen to each other and learn from each other and to seek the truth rather than seek to be right."
~Donella Meadow 

"The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves."
~Rachel Carson

"We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate.  But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy."  
~Wallace Stegner

"We do need a 'new economy,' but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste.  An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product.  We need a peaceable economy."   
~Wendell Berry

"God bless America. Let's save some of it."
  ~Edward Abbey

"It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment."
~Ansel Adams

"Research suggests that exposure to the natural world – including nearby nature in cities – helps improve human health, well-being, and intellectual capacity in ways that science is only recently beginning to understand."
~Richard Louv

"A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children."
~Audubon

"What a country chooses to save is what a country chooses to say about itself."
~Mollie Beattie

"To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival."     
~Wendell Berry

"The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. Save a priceless woodland or an irreplaceable mountain today, and tomorrow it is threatened from another quarter."      
~Hal Borland

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of a least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in."     
~Rachel Carson

"In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught."     
~Baba Dioum

"Till now man has been up against nature, from now on he will be up against his own nature."      
~Dennis Gabor

"It is our task in our time and in our generation, to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours."      
~John F. Kennedy

"Increasingly the evidence suggests that people benefit so much from contact with nature that land conservation can now be viewed as a public health strategy."
~Richard Louv

"The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness."
~John Muir

"In the long term, the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it's unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature."     
~Mollie Beattie

"The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children."
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future."      
~Charles A. Lindbergh

"Sustainable development is...development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of further generations to meet their own needs."
~World Commission on Environment and Development

"If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology. We must leave them a glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning, not just after we got through with it."     
~President Lyndon B. Johnson

"Wilderness itself is the basis of all our civilization. I wonder if we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness the right to live on?"     
~Margaret (Mardy) Murie

"There is just one hope for repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche of the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness."    
~Robert Marshall

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."     
~John Muir

"It is imperative to maintain portions of the wilderness untouched so that a tree will rot where it falls, a waterfall will pour its curve without generating electricity, a trumpeter swan may float on uncontaminated water - and moderns may at least see what their ancestors knew in their nerves and blood."   
~Bernard De Voto

"If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go.... This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future."    
~Terry Tempest Williams

"For if one link in nature's chain might be lost, another might be lost, until the whole of things will vanish by piecemeal."    
~Thomas Jefferson

"There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before."   
~Robert Lynd

"Without knowing it, we utilize hundreds of products each day that owe their origin to wild animals and plants. Indeed our welfare is intimately tied up with the welfare of wildlife. Well may conservationists proclaim that by saving the lives of wild species, we may be saving our own."     
~Norman Myers

"The value of biodiversity is more than the sum of its parts."
~Byran G. Norton

"Without habitat, there is no wildlife. It's that simple."
~Wildlife Habitat Canada

"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."  
~John Muir