William Irwin Thompson Quotes

Americans trash the planet not because we're evil, but because the industrial systems we've devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works.

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

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

Even the wealth of the U.S. cannot protect against the levels of environmental destruction that we are unleashing.

I never lose an opportunity to speak about my obsession: humankind and the environment.

Wouldn't it help Americans more, in the long run, if we were forced to accept some responsibility for the environmental wreckage we prefer to assume is totally out of our control?

A fascinating challenge facing today's environmental movement is how to best approach the reversal of past decisions that altered once-pristine environmental spaces for the sake of urgent man-made needs.

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.

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.

I'm a radical environmentalist; I think the sooner we asphyxiate in our own filth, the better. The world will do better without us. Maybe some fuzzy animals will go with us, but there'll be plenty of other animals, and they'll be back.

Mother Nature comes up against reality, and the reality is that the system doesn't work.

The environmental crisis is all a result of rushing.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

I think that witnessing ecological problems visible from space is one of the new and essential roles of astronauts.

What's it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it's not altogether pleasant.

I do believe very strongly that all of us and all of the other things in the context of our planet with Mother Nature, all of these things absolutely have a profound effect.

The environment has fallen to the wayside in politics.

What I have experienced over time is that environmental problems are easier to deal with in ways that don't go into their interconnections to the rest of what we are.

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.

It is shocking to smite down trees for mere decorations.

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

Man's war against nature is a war against himself.

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”