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"God blessed [male and female] and said to them: Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living creature that moves on the ground."
                                                                                     The Bible Genesis 2, 28

"The language we speak [indigenous peoples] is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way, because it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenant of Western thinking – that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use."
                                                                                             Robin Wall Kimmerer

"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man."
                                                                         Thomas Robert Malthus, 1798

"Let us not be very hopeful about our human conquest over nature. For each such victory, nature manages to take her revenge."
                                                                                                  Friedrich Engels




Harper's Weekly, New York, 2 August 1884





The Courant, [Journal of the Minnesota Federation of Women's Clubs], Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons




Puck, New York, 9 August 1905




Theodore Roosevelt, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons








Life, New York, 22 July 1909





Collier's, New York, 25 July 1909





Art Young, Life, New York, 7 October 1909












              




Life, New York, 21 June 1917




Free Press Prairie Farmer, Winnipeg, 31 October 1917




The Liberator, New York, July 1921








 




                            "Keep Them Tied Up Forever"
Donald McRitchie, Halifax Herald, 20 April 1926












 








Herb Block, Chicago Daily News, 24 April 1929







 




Workers Age, NY. 31 December 1938





Unclean Water Can Kill, Have it Tested. LAC, Acc. No. R1300-341, 1944






















 


 
  






 



 

"Civilization is being poisoned by its own waste products."
                                                     Dean William Ralph Inge


"The problem of population is the problem of our age."
                                                              Julien Huxley



Fred Wright, The Fisherman, Vancouver, 15 September 1961


 

"The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers and sea . . . this pollution is for the most part irrecoverable."
                                                                                                Rachel Carson

"Man is the only organism known that lives by destroying the environment indispensible to his survival."
                                                                                    William Vogt, 1963
 



 



 





 

 
 
 


"Any fine morning a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow."
Edwin Way Teale, Autumn Across America

"We will not barter a clean and wholesome environment for industrial or commercial growth and call it progress."
Pierre Elliot Trudeau, 30 May 1967
 



In our good city the pollution of the atmosphere
does not present any immediate danger!
Shipping Commission
Mollet, Le Soleil de Vancouver, 19 July 1968



 
"...and I'd like to see the other two levels of government doing something about pollution.". LAC, Acc. No. 1988-243-241, Estate of Len Norris 20 September 1968















Society for Promoting Environmental Conservation, Board of Directors, 1969





It's going to cost you dear, my fellow, to poison the atmosphere.
Eveque, Le Soleil de Vancouver, 6 June 1969





These earthlings have an incredible technique: they have discovered a pollution-free transport system.
Le Soleil de Vancouver, 5 September 1969












 



AH! I'VE CAUGHT YOU POLLUTING ON THE SLY ROGUE!
Jean-Pierre Girerd, La Presse, Montréal, 6 March 1970




 



 


  
 

 

 

 

 



The Peak, Burnaby, 16 September 1970




 

 

 


Varsity, Toronto, 9 September 1970






Varsity, Toronto, 9 September 1970



"When the last tree is cut down. The last river poisoned. The last fish caught. Then only will the white man discover that he cannot eat money."
                                                                                                      Cree proverb




 

 
 
White Owl Conservation Award: 'Some day son, all this will be yours'. LAC, 1984-92-190, Ben Wicks 1970-1979

 

 
April Fool! Pollution Probe at The University of Toronto. LAC, 1984-92-131, 1970-1979




Queen's Journal, Kingston, 19 January 1971




























 







 




















LOCAL FRESH CLAMS - WARNING-SHELLFISH CONTAMINATED - BAN. LAC, Acc. No. 1988-243-368, Estate of Len Norris 18 May 1973










 




The proportions of countries are based on their oil reserves. We can therefore see that most of the oil reserves are in the Middle East.
Le Journal, Montréal, 2 January 1974



George Shane, LAC 1991-26-387























The Lance, Windsor, 18 March 1977



 

















Herb Block, Washington Post, 2 January 1980











 



"Preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it's common sense. Our physical health, our social happiness, and our economic well-being will be sustained only by all of us working in partnership as thoughtful, effective stewards of our natural resources."
                                                                               Ronald Regan, 11 July 1984







 







"We can't live for more than a few minutes without air, a few days without water, a few weeks without food. Yet we continue to destroy the very things that keep us alive and in the process rob our children of a future."
                                     Anita Gordon and David Suzuki, It's a Matter of Survival, 1990

"Once it took Haida Indians in the Queen Charlotte Islands more than a year to cut down a single giant cedar. When the Europeans arrived with the technological know-how – the two-men saw and steel ax – the task was shortened to a week. Today, one man with a portable chain saw can fell that tree in an hour."
                                     Anita Gordon and David Suzuki, It's a Matter of Survival, 1990
 

"We are like the yeast in a vat – mindlessly multiplying as we greedily devour a finite world. If we do not change our ways, we will perish as the yeast perish – having exhausted our sustenance and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes."
                                                                                             Farley Mowat, 1990



 



"We cannot continue to mortgage our children's futures by opting for short-term profit and power. We need a radically different notion of society's priorities, a redefinition of the word progress and our relationship with nature."
David Suzuki, Empire Club speech, 8 December 1988








George Shane




McGill Daily, Montreal, 30 January 1989












The Lance, Windsor, 13 March 1991


 

"We were taught that, if we take care of Mother Earth, it would take care of us."
                                                                                                    Bev Sellars

"No trees, no fish, no jobs."
                        Protest sign

"Only when the last tree has died and the last river poisoned and the last fish been caught will we  realize we cannot eat money."
                                                                                       Cree proverb 1992

George Shane



 







"If you take care of and respect the land you live on, the land will take care of you."
Chilcotin elders








 
 
  


Ussher, The Gateway, Winnipeg, 14 October 1999
 









2002, Provincial Archives of Alberta, PR2004.0675.0378


"Each of us is quite literally created by air, water, soil and sunlight, and what cleanses and renews these fundamental elements of life is the web of living things on the planet. Our increased technological dexterity allows us to exploit Earth's resources-trees, fish, minerals, food and so forth-on a vast scale . . . Taken together, these factors have increased our ecological footprint beyond the capacity of the Earth to cleanse and replenish itself."
                       David Suzuki, Sacred Balance Rediscovering Our Place in Nature, 2002









College of New Caledonia, 1 January 2003



 

"The philosophy of the Stoney Tribe is to live in harmony with nature and in accordance with the Great Spirit, respecting all things He has created. If you destroy nature or the environment, you are ultimately destroying yourself. If you protect and preserve nature and the environment, you are protecting yourself."
                                        Chief John Snow, These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places

"Life is not only human life, but the life of the forest, the trees, the elements of nature, and so on. The elders were saying that unless modern society is in tune with those things, it will continue to destroy, to pollute, and to make bigger machines and greater weapons that eventually will destroy the planet earth. The elders believe we must teach all of our brothers and sisters that life is interrelated, and we must live in harmony in the renewal process of the seasons. . . If we begin to mar and destroy the rhythms and harmonies of Nature w are destroying Earth and its inhabitants, including humankind."
                                        Chief John Snow, These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places

Only after the last tree
Has been cut down,
Only after the last river
Has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish
Has been caught,
Only then
Will you find that money
Cannot be eaten.
Cree Indian Prophesy



"Exxon knew about climate change half a century ago. They deceived the public, misled their shareholders, and robbed humanity of a generation's worth of time to reverse climate change."
Jim Hoggan Climate Cover-up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming

 

"James Hansen [a highly respected scientist] warned [in March 2016] that, on our current emissions trajectory, we face 'the loss of all coastal cities, most of the world's large cities and all their history'––and not in thousands of years from now but as soon as this century."
                                        Naomi Klein, On The (Burning) Case for  a Green New Deal



"Ours is the first generation to deeply understand the damage we have been doing to our planetary household, and probably the last generation with the chance to doe something transformative about it."
                                                                Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics


"Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people, to give them hope. But I don't want your hope. I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is."
              Greta Thunberg, World Economic Forum, Davos Switzerland, 29 January 2019
 

"The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. We have lost time. We must act now."
Robert Watson, Chair, United Nations' Intergovernmental Science-Policy on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service, May 2019

"The planet has warmed by about 1 degree Celsius since we began burning coal on an industrial scale and average temperatures are on track to rise by as much as four times that amount before the century is up . . . keeping temperatures below the 1.5 degree Celcius threshold is humanity's best chance of avoiding truly catastrophic unraveling. . . the fossil fuel corporations . . . have funded a decades-long campaign of disinformation, obfuscation, and straight-up lies about the reality of global warming . . .
Clean tech and renewables create far more jobs than coal, oil, and gas. As for the supposedly prohibitive costs, trillions have been marshaled for endless wars, bank bailouts, and subsidies for fossil fuels, in the same years that coffers have been virtually empty for climate transition."
                                     Naomi Klein, On The (Burning) Case for  a Green New Deal


"Why do you fight for our planet? For me, it's to save lives, protect our children's future, fight for social and racial justice and support people's health and human rights around the world."
                                                              Gaurab Basu, Cambridge Health Alliance
 

"If everyone in the world lived like the average North American,  we would need five planet Earths to support them."
                                                                                            Katherine Hayhoe

"Walking out is not an option. We don't get to give up. The planet is the only home we'll ever have."
                                                                                                         Mary Man

"There is no Planet B."
Climate Activist's Placard

"SCHOOL STRIKE FOR THE CLIMATE
I want you to panic.  I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. I want you to act.  I want you to act as as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is."
                                                                                                 Greta Thunberg

"Reduce reuse, recycle."
Environmentalisms three Rs 

 

"We are all accustomed to the dire metaphors used to evoke the havoc of climate change, but in many parts of the Arctic the metaphors have already become a very real literal reality. For a number of reasons, the planet warms several times faster at the poles. While climate experts warn that an increase of two degrees in the global average temperature is the threshold of disaster, in the Arctic we have already seen nearly double that. As the permafrost melts, roads and airport runways buckle. Homes and buildings along the coast sink into the ground and fall into the sea. The natural ice cellars that are used for food storage are no longer cold. Glaciers are melting so fast that they now create dangerous torrents. The world becomes focused and horrified only by haunting images of polar bears struggling to find ice, but hunters too are finding that the once reliable ice can be deadly."
                                                              Sheila Watt-Cloutier, The Right to be Cold


DON'T BUY STUFF YOU DON'T NEED. SAVE THE PLANET

"What happens to nature, to water and air will soon happen to mankind. Respect the land and take care of it, in turn, it will take care of you. Whatever you do to earth, you also do to your children."
                                                                              Doug Myers of the Tsilhqot'in