• "Now warnings of a different sort signal an environmental holocaust without precedent.  But where is the moral alertness that might make us more sensitive to the new pattern of environmental change?  Once again, world leaders waffle, hoping the danger will dissipate.  Yet today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.  We are still reluctant to believe that our worst nightmares of a global ecological collapse could come true; much depends on how quickly we can recognize the danger.  How much more evidence is needed by the politic to justify taking action?" (177-78)
• "The strange absence of emotion, the banal face of evil so often manifested by mass technological assaults on the global environment, is surely a consequence of the belief in an underlying separation of intellect from the physical world." (258)
• "The struggle to save the global environment is in one way much more difficult than the struggle to vanquish Hitler, for this time the war is with ourselves.  We are the enemy, just as we have only ourselves as allies." (275)

• "The Pacific yew can be cut down and processed to produce a potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of lung, breast, and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly die.  It seems an easy choice -- sacrifice the tree for a human life -- until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated, that only specimens more than a hundred years old contain the potent chemical in their bark, and that there are very few of these yews remaining on earth.  Suddenly we must confront some tough questions.  How important are the medical needs of future generations?  Are those of us alive today entitled to cut down all of these trees to extend the lives of a few of us, even if it means that this unique form of life will disappear forever, thus making it impossible to save human lives in the future?" (119)

• "We now face a crisis entirely of our own making: we are drowning in information." (200)
• "Vast amounts of unused information ultimately become a kind of pollution." (201)
• "It is not a coincidence that we have a crisis in education coinciding with our surfeit of information.  Education is the recycling of knowledge, but we find it easier to generate new facts than to conserve and use the knowledge we already have.  So when faced with the problem of ignorance, we immediately create more and more information without seeming to realize that while it may be valuable, it is no substitute for knowledge -- much less wisdom.  Indeed, by generating raw data in much larger quantities than ever before, we have begun to interfere with the process by which information eventually becomes knowledge." (201) 

• "Just as war has been a part of civilization for thousands of years, so too has our age-old practice of exploiting the earth for sustenance, for food, water, shelter, clothing, and our other basic needs." (206)
• "Ironically, it is our very separation from the physical world that creates much of this pain, and it is because we are taught to live so separately from nature that we feel so utterly dependent upon our civilization, which has seemingly taken nature's place in meeting all our needs  Just as the children in a dysfunctional family experience pain when their parent leads them to believe that something important is missing from their psyches, we surely experience a painful loss when we are led to believe that the connection to the natural world that is part of our birthright as a species is something unnatural, something to be rejected as a rite of passage into the civilized world.  As a result, we internalize the pain of our lost sense of connection to the natural world, we consume the earth and its resources as a way to distract ourselves from the pain, and we search insatiably for artificial substitutes to replace the experience of communion with the world that has been taken from us."(231)
• "we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization." (269)

• "The waste crisis is integrally related to the crisis of industrial civilization as a whole." (147)
• "the waste disposal crisis stems from our lost sense of place within the natural world." (159)
• "in psychological terms, our rapid and aggressive expansion into what remains of the wildness of the earth represents an effort to plunder from outside civilization what we cannot find inside." (234)

• "When giving us dominion over the earth, did God choose an appropriate technology? ... one is tempted to answer, the jury is still out." (238)
• "Our bodies and our minds . . . are hardly perfect technologies." (212)
• "part of the solution for the environmental crisis may well lie in our ability to achieve a better balance between the sexes" (213) 

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