Douglas Adams Quotes

The ecosystem of our world is a closed system: it would run out of gas, collapse of its own weight.

The narrative of progress is no longer sustainable.

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

On my 70th birthday, I was asked how I felt about mankind's prospects. This is my reply: We are behaving like yeasts in a brewer's vat, multiplying mindlessly while greedily consuming the substance of a finite world. If we continue to imitate the yeasts, we will perish as they perish, having exhausted our resources and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes. Unlike the yeasts, we have a choice. What will it be?

Capitalism rules worldwide, and a society whose economic fabric depends on constant growth requires that its citizens have ever-expanding needs and wants... In the West, it will take one with soul force equal to Gandhi's to change the prevailing dogma of ever increasing GNP. We may be forced to change our profligate ways some day, when the soil is depleted, the aquifers drained, the icecaps melted, and all the oil wells pumped dry. But the crisis will wait another fifty years or so; we'll leave those problems to a generation yet unborn.

Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.

Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical civilization makes up particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them [scientists] agree, the end of human life on earth is assured.

As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.

The silence of the world could not rein back it's greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.

My greatest hope is that we transcend the most fearful thing, which is that we are rapidly degrading the ecological systems on this planet that support everything we are doing and all life on it.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

It wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it.

Man has tried his suicide with bigotry and hate, but in the end he'll kill himself with nothing but his waste.

Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.

The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us.

As it turns out, the ecological catastrophe Kirk feared that would be the consequence of our impiety appears not to be one of radically diminished resources, but of potentially catastrophic climate change. It comes from an arrogant refusal by a modern consumerist society to accept limits on its desires. Kirk's idea of the "eternal society" evaporates before the insatiable demands of the Everlasting Now.

In fact, the environmental crisis is related to the crisis of aesthetics, crisis of social cohesion and the crisis of spiritual values.

I think we're simply going to run out of Nature before we have a chance to destroy it.

Our house is burning and we look elsewhere. Nature, mutilated and over-exploited, can no longer reconstitute itself and we refuse to admit it. Humanity is suffering. It is suffering from poor development, in the North as in the South, and we are indifferent. The Earth and humanity are in peril and we are all responsible. It is time now to open our eyes

The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.

Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to happen to us.

Our numbers expand, but Earth's natural systems do not.

But we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.

If enough species are extinguished, will the ecosystems collapse, and will the extinction of most other species follow soon afterward? The only answer anyone can give is: possibly. By the time we find out, however, it might be too late. One planet, one experiment.

Anyone who thinks humans are not capable of so fouling their own nest that the land and the waters can no longer be productive just hasn't been paying attention.