Water Pollution Quotes (17 quotes)
[Reporting after the now infamous 22 Jun 1969 burning of the Cuyahoga River:] Some River! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. “Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown,” Cleveland’s citizens joke grimly. “He decays” … The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: “The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes.” It is also—literally—a fire hazard.
— Magazine
As reported in Time magazine (1 Aug 1969).
City after city, state after state, had essentially failed in their efforts to protect their air and their water, the land, the health of their citizens. By 1970, our city’ skylines were so polluted that in many places it was all but impossible to see from one city skyscraper to another. … We had rivers that were fouled with raw sewage and toxic chemicals. One actually caught on fire. There was a very famous photograph from my teenage years of the Cuyahoga River
burning. In fact, it was memorialized in a song at the time.
In 'Environmental Protection: Meeting the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century', Harvard Environmental Law Review (2001), 25, 329, 330-331. [In fact, the Cuyahoga River had caught fire several times over a number of decades, and there had been fires on other rivers. Webmaster]
Clean air, clean water, open spaces—these should once again be the birthright of every American. If we act now, they can be.
In State of the Union Address (22 Jan 1970).
Copious springs are found where there are mines of gold, silver, iron, copper, lead, and the like, but they are very harmful.
In De Architectura, Book 7, Chap 3, Sec. 5. As translated in Morris Hicky Morgan (trans.), Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture (1914), 234.
Filthy water cannot be washed.
African proverb. As given in William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (ed.), The Crisis: A Record Of The Darker Races (1969), Vol. 30-31, 87.
I am concerned about the air we breathe and the water we drink. If overfishing continues, if pollution continues, many of these species will disappear off the face of the earth.
I shall propose to this Congress a $10 billion nationwide clean waters program to put modern municipal waste treatment plants in every place in America where they are needed to make our waters clean again, and do it now. We have the industrial capacity, if we begin now, to build them all within 5 years. This program will get them built within 5 years.
In State of the Union Address (22 Jan 1970). [The Clean Air Act was signed by President Richard Nixon on 31 Dec 1970.]
It’s a numbers game—in a dense urban area there are so many of us that even unintentional pollution would cause all the crap we see in the water.
Posted by 'Lisa' (6 Mar 2008), Reply in blog 'Emerald City' to item 'The Plague that is the plastic bag, in photos', Los Angeles Times website (1 Mar 2008).
Poisoning water is an assassination.
Statement to the Twelfth Meeting With the Panel on Science and Technology (28 Jan 1971), printed in Proceedings Before the Committee on Science and Astronautics, U.S. House of Representatives, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session, No. 1, (1971), 326.
The next decade will perhaps raise us a step above despair to a cleaner, clearer wisdom and biology cannot fail to help in this. As we become increasingly aware of the ethical problems raised by science and technology, the frontiers between the biological and social sciences are clearly of critical importance—in population density and problems of hunger, psychological stress, pollution of the air and water and exhaustion of irreplaceable resources.
As quoted in 'H. Bentley Glass', New York Times (12 Jan 1970), 96.
The quality of Mersey is not strained. A century ago the river of that name, in England, afforded not less than sixty varieties of fish; now it affords none. (1876)
Description of the turbid, polluted River Mersey, Liverpool, England in the nineteenth century. In Daily Alta California (21 Aug 1876), 28, No. 9633, 2. The expression “The quality of Mersey is not strained” is seen repeated in various sources through the years to the present. The pun refers a line in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice that “The quality of mercy is not strained.” An earlier mention appears in Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Dec 1870), 42, No. 247, 158.
The river Mersey, a mile-wide estuary not unlike the Hudson, perhaps in my childhood even more filthy. We used to say “the quality of Mersey is not strained.”
In Kenneth Ewart Boulding and Richard P. Beilock (Ed.), Illustrating Economics: Beasts, Ballads and Aphorisms (1980, 2009), 3.
This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species.
In 'The Land Ethic: The Community Concept', A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There (1949, 1987), 204.
Those who nod sagely and quote the tragedy of the commons in relation to environmental problems from pollution of the atmosphere to poaching of national parks tend to forget that Garrett Hardin revised his conclusions many times…. He recognized, most importantly, that anarchy did not prevail on the common pastures of medieval England in the way he had described…. “A managed commons, though it may have other defects, is not automatically subject to the tragic fate of the unmanaged commons,” wrote Hardin…. At sea, where a common exists in most waters… None of Hardin’s requirements for a successfully managed common is fulfilled by high-seas fishery regimes.
In The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and what We Eat (2004), 153-155.
Water is the most precious, limited natural resource we have in this country… But because water belongs to no one—except the people—special interests, including government polluters, use it as their private sewers.
In Nader’s Foreword to David Zwick, Marcy Benstock and Ralph Nader, Water wasteland: Ralph Nader's Study Group Report on Water Pollution (1971), xiii.
We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.
In State of the Union Address (22 Jan 1970).
When all the trees have been cut down,
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.
when all the animals have been hunted,
when all the waters are polluted,
when all the air is unsafe to breathe,
only then will you discover you cannot eat money.
Quoted in Kim Lim (ed.), 1,001 Pearls of Spiritual Wisdom: Words to Enrich, Inspire, and Guide Your Life (2014), 28
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
