Pollution

While we squabble over the supposed harm spray cans may be doing to pale-skinned bathers — no one else would be injured — species are being driven to extinction, millions of our fellow humans are starving, and the world is teetering in the direction of war. Could it be that something is wrong with our sense of priorities?
— Michael Allaby and Jim Lovelock, ‘Spray cans: the threat that never was’, New Scientist 17 July 1980, 212-214.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
— William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Macbeth, I, i, 10.

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
— Rachel Carson (1907-1964) Silent Spring, chapter 1 (1962).

Forget six counties overhung with smoke,
Forget the snorting steam and piston stroke,
Forget the spreading of the hideous town;
Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,
And dream of London, small and white and clean,
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.
— William Morris (1834 – 1896), The Earthly Paradise (prologue, ‘The Wanderers’).

O what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake
And no bird sings.
— John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, 1819.

Take your chance on ozone. There isn’t any such thing anyway. Or, if there is, you can buy a Thermos bottle full for five cents, and put it in your cupboard.
— Stephen Leacock ‘How to live to be 200’ in Literary Lapses, 1910.

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