Mark Kurlansky Quotes

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

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.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

I think the greatest challenge in environmentalism and the most rewarding challenge is trying to figure out how humans can meet their needs while protecting the environment.

In Kenya women are the first victims of environmental degradation, because they are the ones who walk for hours looking for water, who fetch firewood, who provide food for their families.

In the Java Sea in Indonesia, I have seen fishers going out in the morning, six of them going out and coming back with five pounds of fish. That is the end point, a pound of fish per person per day to sell for rice. That's where fisheries go if you let it happen. That's where it stabilizes. These people cannot feed their families.

'The Skeptical Environmentalist' was much more the idea of the scientific argument of realizing that we need to be skeptical about a lot of these stories that we hear and to put them in context.

The Polynesians used to have a system where they proclaimed a fishing area as 'taboo.' If any fisherman was caught fishing in a taboo area, they would be killed. The Polynesians understand that the fish had to be given a chance to recover.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?

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.

People who are not addressing the issues of population control are not seriously addressing the environment.

Conservation is not without a cost.

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

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.

We have to prove to the disinherited majority of the world that ecology and conservation will not work against their interest but will bring an improvement in their lives.

Earth was not built for six billion people all running around and being passionate about things. The world was built for about two million people foraging for roots and grubs.

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

Population control is not an issue involving contraceptives for third world women. It is an issue of ecological justice.

All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.

If it's unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is the rule of nature

It took Britain half the resources of the planet to achieve its prosperity; how many planets will a country like India require?

We Americans think we are pretty good! We want to build a house, we cut down some trees. We want to build a fire, we dig a little coal. But when we run out of all these things, then we will find out just how good we really are.

We share this planet, our home, with millions of species. Justice and sustainability both demand that we do not use more resources than we need.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak.