Winnie Byanyima Quotes

Endangered forests are being slaughtered for toilet paper.

Look at timber prices in the late '90s, at around $50. If you count the true damage of cutting down forests, the resultant flooding, insurance claims, and so on, then the timber price should have been $100.

If you cut down a forest, it doesn't matter how many sawmills you have if there are no more trees.

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

The degradation of natural resources such as forests and freshwater has removed much of the resilience that societies formerly enjoyed.

Pollution is a serious one. Water pollution, air pollution, and then solid hazardous waste pollution. And then beyond that, we also have the resources issue. Not just water resources but other natural resources, the mining resources being consumed, and the destruction of our ecosystem.

The G8 nations, together with the five major emerging economies of China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico, use almost three-quarters of the Earth's biocapacity - the capacity of the world's ecosystems to produce natural resources and to reduce harmful substances.

I'm boiling about the rainforests being chopped down to make disposable chopsticks. I'm boiling about the fact that we have palm oil put into every single one of our substances.

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

For centuries, building materials were free. You want to build a house, you cut down some trees. But we haven't been thinking about the cost to the planet.

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

If you have forest, if you have green forest, the water table goes up. What happens with deforestation is the water level goes down and we all know how much importance drinking water has.

The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastation of rain forests, and other worldwide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.

Our government has done nothing effective with its forests, though the best in the world, but is like a rich and foolish spendthrift who has inherited a magnificent estate in perfect order, and then has left his rich fields and meadows, forests and parks, to be sold and plundered and wasted at will …

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.

As a nation we have not yet come to have a proper respect for the forest and to regard it as an indispensable part of our resources—one which is easily destroyed but difficult to replace; one which confers great benefits while it endures, but whose disappearance is accompanied by a train of evil consequences not readily foreseen and positively irreparable.

The world's forests are being destroyed at the rate of one football field's worth every second. One Tennessee's worth every year.

The plundering for profit of the world's natural resources has threatened the very sustainability of the planet.

Deforestation will continue as long as cutting down and burning trees is more economic than preserving them.

If you're trashing your own country, ruining the soils, contaminating the waters and the air, cutting down trees, overfishing the lakes, rivers and oceans, you're not much of a patriot.

Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth's living systems.

The most striking thing to me about human space flight and my own personal experience is that I've seen dramatic changes on Earth. We humans are rapidly changing the planet. I've watched Amazonia as the rainforest has been cut down. That's something I've seen out the window. I'm very worried about that.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

The extraction of oil, coal and minerals brought, and still brings, a cost to the environment.

What we are doing is, rather than living on the interest of our basic biological capital, we're using up our capital, so we're dipping into our capital. We're using up what should be our children's and grandchildren's legacy.