Ethan Hawke Quotes

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

Economic growth and environmental protection are not at odds. They're opposite sides of the same coin if you're looking at longer-term prosperity.

This whole idea that we address environmental issues by not doing stuff just doesn't work.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution, and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources, there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.

The planet's environmental woes tend to be overlooked as we scramble for the latest high-tech gizmos - and conveniently ignore their energy consumption.

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

With increasing fervor since the 1980s, sustainability has been the watchword of scientists, environmental activists, and indeed all those concerned about the complex, fragile systems on the sphere we inhabit. It has shaped debates about business, design, and our lifestyles.

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

We learned that economic growth and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand.

… work [jobs] and the environment should not be played off against each other.

For too long, the world has been focused on short-term growth and development at the expense of our long-term survival as we have depleted our natural resources at historically reckless rates.

I agree on the need for environmental sustainability. It is no good raising gross national income while at the same time destroying natural assets.

It would be a mistake to believe that environmental protection and economic growth are mutually exclusive.

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.

After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.

Environmental concern is a phenomena that tends to rise in a nation after a certain level of wealth.

A sustainable world means working together to create prosperity for all.

It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival.

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.

Address these environmental issues and you will address every issue known to man. And we keep dabbling in things that aren't really that important in the long term.