6 Neal Stephenson Quotes on Environment

Neal Stephenson quotes on environment

6. Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school, we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and academic at the right times .... Boston University, where I did my Master's ... most students had no time for sonic war, and the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than tweedy black bachelors.

11. And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of Basco's pipes was a hundred thousand times more concentrated than was legally allowed. ... That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they'll pass you off as a flake. You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken, but if I say 'More than twice the legal limit,' they get comfortably outraged.

15. In four years of work, I've idled my Zodiac down every one of its thousands of inlets, looked at every inch of its fractal coastline and found every single goddamned pipe that empties into it. Some of the pipes are big enough to park a car in and some are the size of your finger, but all of them have told their story to my gas chromatograph. And often it's the littlest pipes that cause the most damage. When I see a big huge pipe coming right out of a factory, I'm betting the pumpers have at least read the EPA regs. But when I find a tiny one, hidden below the waterline, sprouting from a mile-wide industrial carnival, I put on gloves before taking my sample. And sometimes the gloves melt.

17. Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking:. Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. That's partly because I'm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. : there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals. You just plug the pipes.

22. 'It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture.' 'I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that.' 'Well, I wouldn't say it in public.'

23. The intern had also discovered a vague little article from the late Sixties saying that Basco had put some 'junk machinery' on the floor of the Harbor, giving the usual feeble excuse. 'They claim that this junk was going to become a habitat for marine life. You don't buy that?' Bless her, she did know how to blow my lid. 'Rebecca, goddamnit, since the beginning of time, every corporation that has ever thrown any of its shit into the ocean has claimed that it was going to become a habitat for marine life. It's the goddamn ocean, Rebecca. That's where all the marine life is. Of course it's going to become a habitat for marine life.'