Jared Diamond Quotes

Maybe we have enough technology to save the planet but it is not enough because the people are not ready.

Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path - the landscape, the natural environment.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

We have to prepare for what life could become in 40 years. We need to outline what is possible and what is impossible with the non-renewable resources of the Earth. What role will technological improvement play? Taking all this into account, what kind of life can we produce in the best way for 10 billion people? That's a problem that needs to be solved.

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

The industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company's bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy.

Environmental problems cannot be resolved here the way they are resolved in other countries. I heard that 80 per cent of the environmental problems in the U.S. are solved in court. That can't happen here.

We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.

The most important and urgent problems of the technology of today are no longer the satisfactions of the primary needs or of archetypal wishes, but the reparation of the evils and damages by the technology of yesterday.

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.

I think that for all of the dangers of technology spreading, I think it is more dangerous in some ways that it doesn't. My simple reason for that is we've got 7 billion people on the planet, and we have these very serious problems, and I think we don't know who's going to have the answers to the problems that are coming around the bend.

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is why we have the global problems we face today.

There are more effective ways of tackling environmental problems including global warming, proliferation of plastics, urban sprawl, and the loss of biodiversity than by treaties, top-down regulations, and other approaches offered by big governments and their dependents.

In many cases, the politicians who decided to construct a dam many years ago made mistakes. The problems a dam was built to solve sometime don't materialize or are resolved in other ways. A dam might be poorly designed or improperly constructed. For whatever reason, mistakes are made. In other instances, dams out-live their usefulness. We all make mistakes, and we all understand that an object can become obsolete. Times and conditions change.

Man will survive as a species for one reason: He can adapt to the destructive effects of our power-intoxicated technology and of our ungoverned population growth, to the dirt, pollution and noise of a New York or Tokyo. And that is the tragedy. It is not man the ecological crisis threatens to destroy but the quality of human life.

The affluent society has become an effluent society. The 6 percent of the world's population in the United States produces 70 percent or more of the world's solid wastes

We must subject the machine—technology—to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

We have changed our environment more quickly than we have learned how to change ourselves.

If you develop in the old fashioned way there are enormous costs (to the environment)….but we have to demonstrate it, not just tell people.

How much longer, for instance, can we continue to crowd more and more people into this world? …. How long can we permit the uncontrolled use of the earth's resources when there is no possibility of replacing them? Indeed, how long will it be before we have completely used up everything our lives depend on? These issues are the politics of the future. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have begun to spell out in substantive fashion the means by which we can control population growth, environmental problems, and the conservation of our natural resources.

With science, technology and globalization, man is changing the world faster than his evolution can keep up with the new dangers.

We are much better at creating complex technologies than we are at controlling them.

Since the mid-1970s, people have been consuming more resources than the planet’s natural capital can replenish.

Design our world so that we have positive social and environmental side effects.