"The alarm bells of climate change are ringing for all of us; the weather will not wait... We are all in the greenhouse together, nobody can stop the world and get off."
- Mostafa K. Tolba,
Exec. Director of UN Environment Programme
"Yes, we can win this struggle, no matter how overwhelming it may seem. Those of us who are willing to heed Earth's warning signals -- global warming, ozone holes, toxic ground water, acid rain, disappearing species, drought and hunger -- can issue a warning of our own to the politicians and the corporations: Starting now, at the beginning of a new decade, you WILL be held accountable."
- Denis Hayes,
National Coordinator of Earth Day 1970,
Chairman of Earth Day 1990
"The greenhouse effect...is changing our climate now...It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here"
- James E. Hansen,
Director of NASA's
Goddard Institute for Space Studies
"As I recently stated before a US Senate committee investigating the spill, when we are confronted with death, with destruction, it is common to feel grief, to mourn. We all mourn for Prince William Sound and the life that is no more. And it is also natural to feel anger. Anger over broken promises, anger over lies. Anger over greed, arrogance, ineptitude. Anger that so few can destroy so much.
Anger can be constructive, but only if we use its energy to undertake constructive tasks. We must never forget our grief or our anger; we must learn from this tragedy, and we must act on its lessons."
- Michael L. Fisher,
Executive Director,
Sierra Club
"Global warming will be the greatest environmental challenge of the 21st century."
- Senator Albert Gore
"Tree-planting has the virtue of being an action that moves in the right direction and that educates about the fundamental nature of the global issue at the same time."
- R. Neil Sampson,
Exec. Vice President,
American Forestry Association
"It is quite common on the scientific side of industry to believe that there aren't any real environmental problems, that there are just public relations problems."
- Sherry Roland,
Chemist at Univ. of California, Irvine,
who with Mario Molina, discovered in 1974
that CFCs destroy ozone.
"We believe that tropical rainforests are one of the most important global ecological issues of our time. These forests are a vital part of the life support systems of the planet. To ensure their survival is to ensure our own survival. If we don't act now they could be gone by the year 2050. We may be the last generation that will have the chance to save the rainforests."
- Randy Hayes,
Executive Director,
Rainforest Action Network
"Mankind is in the process of conducting a major, unintentional experiment, that of feeding back into the atmosphere in a short space of geological time the fossils fuels that have slowly accumulated over the past 500 million years."
- Roger Revelle,
Professor of Science and Public Policy,
University of California
"Without recognition and action, we will continue on a course that is rapidly and fundamentally altering the composition of the atmosphere. By doing nothing, we risk the planet's future. We must change directions. I hope that history will record that at the end of the 20th century, mankind recognized and began to meet this challenge."
- Senator Tim Wirth
"At present we are altering our environment faster than we can understand the resulting climatic changes. If the trend does not stop, we shall eventually either verify or disprove the climate models - by means of a real, global experiment whose consequences we shall not escape."
- Stephen H. Schneider,
Climatologist,
National Center for Atmospheric Research
"People everywhere are offended by pollution. They sense intuitively that we have pressed beyond the limits we should not have exceeded. They want to clean up the world, make it a better place, be good trustees of the earth for future generations."
- James Gustave Speth,
President of the World Resources Institute
"Humanity is conducting an unintended, global pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war. The Earth's atmosphere is being changed at an unprecedented rate by pollutants resulting from human activities, inefficient and wasteful use of fossil fuels, and the effects of rapid population growth in many regions. These changes represent a major threat."
