Peter Singer Quotes

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.

There's a general culture in this country to cut all the trees. It makes me so angry because everyone is cutting and no one is planting.

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.

I was so fanatical about trying to save wildlife... I was unable to accept that we couldn't solve this problem of thousands of years, of wherever humans operated, the environment deteriorated.

The landscape has been so transformed by ignorance, arrogance and greed that those who must prove their case are not those who call for forest protection, but those who call for business as usual.

You cannot, for instance, sustainably protect the environment if the majority of the people are still in primitive agriculture leading to the encroachment of forest reserves.

Tropical rain forests, as well as tropical and temperate dry forests, are being destroyed rapidly. At present rates, some critical forest types will be gone in a few years, and most of the tropical rain forest will be gone before the end of the next century. With them will go large numbers of plant and animal species.

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.

It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.

The latest revelation - from no Mount Sinai, Sermon on the Mount or Bo tree - is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what that creation once was.

It's not that hard to imagine the natural world recovering it's health in our absence: it's more difficult, and more necessary, to imagine it recovering its health in our presence.

If you look at it ecologically, deforestation is high on the list of things which bring devastation. You cut down trees to build homes, for fuel, and you end up with no trees left, and you have to move on. If you take the earth as a whole, eventually there's nowhere to move on to.

The destruction of the natural beauty, the ecosystems, and the majesty of mountains affect us in ways we're not even aware of. Every time a mountain is beheaded, we chop off a little part of our souls.

We're losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet's health and our own.

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.

We've got to step up our conservation efforts before it's too late. We're not protecting our lands and natural resources. Take the Grand Canyon for example; I'm sure that at one time it was a beautiful piece of land, and just look at the way we've let it go.

Rainforest land is mistakenly valued solely for the worth of its timber, mining and oil resources by short-sighted corporations and governments.

What we're doing to the planet is inexcusable.

We are aware only of the empty space in the forest, which only yesterday was filled with trees.

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.

The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution, and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources, there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.