Gilbert F. White famous quotes

Every intervention of man in the environment around him incurs some risk as to both favorable and unfavorable consequences. Every intervention is taken in the face of partial ignorance as to what its effects will be and involves uncertainty as to the ultimate outcome.
-- Gilbert F. White

#Taken #Ignorance #Men

The gap between the rich and poor is growing among and within most nations. The political and social effects of unequal location of energy and other mineral resources are acute. Population numbers continue to climb. The global environment shows signs of widespread deterioration. Both natural and social environments are increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic disturbances... There may, however, be a cheering challenge in the possibility that out of its struggle with these realities the human race may move a bit nearer to behaving as if it were indeed one family.
-- Gilbert F. White

#Cheer #Struggle #Moving

Floods are 'acts of God,' but flood losses are largely acts of man.
-- Gilbert F. White

#Loss #Men #Flood

It would be rash to conclude that, on balance, the environment of the globe as a whole is either deteriorating or improving, or that the survival of the societies we know depends upon filling a simple set of prescriptions. It is all too complex and dynamic, whether it involves managing greenhouse gases or Nile snails... The future condition of the globe's interlocking natural and social systems depends more on human behavior than on the further investigation of natural processes, however desirable that may be.
-- Gilbert F. White

#Simple #Survival #Environmental

One effect of benefit-cost analysis is to give any respectable engineer or economist a means for justifying almost any kind of project the national government wants to justify... Exclusive reliance on benefit-cost analysis has been one of the greatest threats to wise decisions in water development.
-- Gilbert F. White

#Wise #Mean #Government

The issue of world environment has a special kind of urgency... The issue is one of rich peoples and poor peoples, of the growing gap between the two, and of the rich fouling their own nests.
-- Gilbert F. White

#Two #Issues #Special

We can be confident that action which is in accord with a few basic beliefs cannot be wrong and can at least testify to the values we will need to cultivate. These are the beliefs that the human race is a family that has inherited a place on the earth in common, that its members have an obligation to work toward sharing it so that none is deprived of the elementary needs for life, and that all have a responsibility to leave it undegraded for those who follow.
-- Gilbert F. White

#Responsibility #Race #Environmental

The good news about fresh water is that, even after accounting for the larger volume of water that is unavailable to people from the hydrologic cycle, there is enough on a global scale to support current and anticipated populations on a sustainable basis... Three essential goals are dependable and safe supplies for people, protection and management of the environmental systems through which water moves, and efficient water use. Meeting these goals will require that fresh water not continue to be treated as a free good or as the principal means for disposing of human and industrial wastes.
-- Gilbert F. White

#Moving #Mean #Water

Both group effort and individual testimony flow from conviction as to the role of people on earth. In stewardship of the common heritage, a few simple beliefs recur: that all are indeed members of the same human family, that all share in responsibility for the others, that each is capable of responding directly to divine guidance. To seek to translate these into practical action with regard to soil or petroleum or the fish of the sea is not necessarily to do what is directly effective in changing society.
-- Gilbert F. White

#Responsibility #Simple #Sea

If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster

Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.

People say that slaves were taken from Africa. This is not true: People were taken from Africa, among them healers and priests, and were made into slaves.

Indulgence in animal killing for the taste of the tongue is the grossest kind of ignorance

The ground for taking ignorance to be restrictive of freedom is that it causes people to make choices which they would not have made if they had seen what the realization of their choices involved.

His ignorance is encyclopedic.

He (Jeremy Clarkson) is the last man standing on the beach commanding the glaciers' melt waters to go back

God wants us to speak to men so that they will feel it, so that they will never forget it. God means every Christian to be effective, to make a difference in the actual records and results of Christian work. God put each of us here to be a power. There is not one of us but is an essential wheel of the machinery and can accomplish all that God calls us to.

No one man is superior to the game.

Men have presented their plans and philosophies for the remedying of earth's ills, but Jesus stands alone in presenting not a system, but His own personality as capable of supplying the needs of the soul.