R. Buckminster Fuller Quotes

Must we wait for selection to solve the problems of overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, pollution of the environment and a nuclear holocaust, or can we take explicit steps to make our future more secure? In the latter case, must we not transcend selection?

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.

The mature Anthropocene begins when we acquire the ability to live sustainably and become a lasting presence on this world.

There is only one possible future for humanity, and that is a sustainable one.

Humanity as a species must change dramatically and radically or our survival is at stake.

The sustainability revolution will, hopefully, be the third major social and economic turning point in human history, following the Neolithic Revolution - moving from hunter-gathering to farming - and the Industrial Revolution

The key to understanding the future is one word: sustainability.

We only gain collectively by acting now. We gain by one day not having to pay a thing for fuel. We gain by having cleaner air, water, and food so that we are healthier and our health care costs come down. We gain by deflating the global fossil fuel markets that drive much of the conflict around the world.

Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over - unless we find new ways of producing energy.

Reaching a general understanding that sustainability is the ultimate issue will finally bring us face-to-face with the political challenge of forging a sustainable society during the next few decades. It is a challenge we can meet if we have the leadership and the political will to do so.

We ought to take good care of everybody we have on the planet, but we ought to regulate the rate at which people join us. The old saying is, "It's the top of the ninth inning, and humanity has been hitting nature hard, but you've always got to remember that nature bats last."

Now we stand at our own crossroads, looking out upon two futures: one with rising temperatures, rising oceans, and rising violence on a hot and strip-mined planet and another with expanding organic harvests, growing solar arrays, and deepening global partnerships on a green and thriving Earth.

We need to support our future instead of undermining human survival. Let's do it.

The most important question we have to deal with is a combination of population control and the control of our environment - how to utilize the world in as effective a way as we can for the future of mankind.

With the world's human population now at seven billion and growing, and the demand for technology and modern conveniences increasing, we can't control all our negative impacts. But we have to find better ways to live within the limits nature and its cycles impose.

I wish we could launch a ground-breaking competition that motivates kids to invent new ideas in sustainable living.

Sustainable development requires human ingenuity. People are the most important resource.

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

A life of stasis would be population control, combined with energy rationing. That is the stasis world that you live in if you stay. And even with improvements in efficiency, you'll still have to ration energy. That, to me, doesn't sound like a very exciting civilization for our grandchildren's grandchildren to live in.

Let's care for the land and water, heal our cherished planet, and promote wellness for all of her people. Water is life. Let's protect the natural resources that our lives depend upon.

Planet Earth is far more resilient than humans and will certainly outlive us.

Securing a sustainable future will take all of us working together.

We only have this one planet; we got to figure out how to live on it without destroying it.

I suppose that's a question most often asked of me by people who would like to make a positive contribution towards a sustainable future and a healthy environment. There are so many things that need to be done that sometimes it seems overwhelming. I try to remind everyone that no one person has to do it all but if each one of us follows our heart and our own inclinations we will find the small things that we can do, and together we will come up with enough to create a sustainable future and a healthy environment.

We don't need new discoveries or new inventions to reverse this trend. We have the tools at our disposal to reverse it. All we need is the motivation, the opportunity and the willpower to do what needs to be done. ...With this report, we have a very solid road map that we need to make these goals real, to solve this problem within a generation.