Aldous Huxley Quotes

The United States has consumed in the last 50 years more natural resources than the rest of the entire human race for all of history.

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

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.

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

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

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that's based on the use of non-renewable resources won't last.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.

For too much of history, we've viewed the world's precious resources - both environmental and human - as things to extract, to make the most of in order to maximize their potential.

Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since.

The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.

We are using resources as if we had two planets, not one. There can be no 'plan B' because there is no 'planet B.'

What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant.

Environmental policy must strike a balance between the earth's best interests and our citizen's pressing needs.

The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

In the United States you use more oil than water. Water takes a few days to recycle. Oil takes 4 million years.

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

Every time there is an economic intensification, there is an ecological impact.

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

Economic growth tends to require the taking of resources from the Earth. So something has to change on a debt-based economy.

We treat a planet at crisis point as an externality that can be shunted into a future generation. We continue to act as if we had the natural resources of several planets, not one.

If you narrow the playing field, the next generation has less to put out, to eat and regenerate from.

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.