James Howard Kunstler Quotes

I think my message to the politicians who have within their power the ability to make change is, 'Do you really, really not care about the future of your great-grandchildren? Because if we let the world continue to be destroyed the way we are now, what's the world going to be like for your great-grandchildren?'

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

I care about this beautiful planet that we all share. This is a home that we have to leave in good shape for the next generations.

Future generations are not going to ask us what political party were you in. They are going to ask what did you do about it, when you knew the glaciers were melting.

We owe at least this much to future generations, from whom we have borrowed a fragile planet called Earth.

I am working hard to provide solutions to meet a most pressing goal: preserving our way of life for our kids and grandkids.

The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live.

The Anthropocentic Age - the first age in which humankind is the dominant species on the planet - cuts both ways: it is up to us to destroy or save the planet. We certainly have the ability.

I gone on for years about the importance of thinking about the long term in relation to the environmental damage, climate change, and everything else because we don’t want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren and I do not want to be confronted by my future grandchild saying, “Well why didn’t you do something?”

We can't continue to take from our planet the way we do and not give anything back, and the idea of, 'Oh, but it's fine, I won't have to deal with it in my lifetime,' well, you need to think about the future generations who will have to deal with it.

We cannot shirk responsibility from concerns for the welfare of the next generation.

I think my job is to leave some evidence for future generations that there was somebody who cared while we were destroying everything.

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.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.

There's no really rosy scenario ahead, where climate change just doesn't happen, but I believe we don't have the ethical right to throw our hands up in the air and say, 'Game over.' Whatever pathway we choose, our descendants will be dealing with that reality for centuries to come.

What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.

Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.

This land, this water, this air, this planet - this is our legacy to our young.

The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.

Land is not something you inherit from your parents. It is something you borrow from your children.

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.

We’re the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.

As artists, we can help, visually and intellectually, to make people understand that, at some point, we have to accept that it is our collective impact that is putting the whole planet in jeopardy.

My main argument is that environmental destruction comes when people externalise their costs and pass them on to future generations. That is obviously something that large enterprises do and they become large by doing it.