My Earth Letter to the President of the United States

Dear President Barack Obama,

My name is Patricia Gonzales. I am 16 years old and I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'm sending you these wisdom quotations because I am concerned about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It is destroying our planet more and more each day. People are trying to clean it up, but it's not working that good because more oil just keeps coming out. I'm worried about all the animals that are getting killed and covered in the oil. I'm also concerned about the people that live in the area and even where I live because who knows if the oil is going to reach us. These wisdom quotations are from different authors, but they have something in common they are all about the earth and the environment.

There's so much pollution in the air now that if it weren't for our lungs there'd be no place to put it all. ~Robert Orben

In America today you can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. ~Paul Brooks, The Pursuit of Wilderness, 1971

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun. ~Ralph Nader, quoted in Linda Botts, ed., Loose Talk, 1980

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. ~Marya Mannes, More in Anger, 1958

I am the earth. You are the earth. The Earth is dying. You and I are murderers. ~Ymber Delecto

For 200 years we've been conquering Nature. Now we're beating it to death. ~Tom McMillan, quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greenhouse Trap, 1990  

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. ~Wallace Stegner, letter to David E. Pesonen of the Wildland Research Center, 3 December 1960 (Thanks, Bekah)

 

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment. ~Ansel Adams

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money. ~Cree Indian Proverb

Some day the earth will weep, she will beg for her life, she will cry with tears of blood. You will make a choice, if you will help her or let her die, and when she dies, you will die too.John Hollow, Horn Oglala Lakota (1932)

     I want the earth to live forever so please help her stay alive. Like I said I'm concerned about this planet, the people and the animals so I would appreciate it if you could do everything in your power to clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and try to prevent it from happening again.

Sincerely, Patricia Gonzales