Svante Arrhenius Quotes

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.

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.

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?

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

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

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

The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.

We can have technology, prosperity, nice homes and cars, but at the same time we must be conscious of what we are dumping into the water, the air and our food.

Environmental policy must strike a balance between the earth's best interests and our citizen's pressing needs.

Ecological policy rejects exploitative forms of economy and the unscrupulous plundering of natural resources and raw materials, as well as the destructive interventions into nature's ability to renew itself. We believe that the exploitation of nature as well as human beings must be stopped if we are to master this acute threat to life on earth.

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.

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 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?”

Energy conservation is a responsibility that falls on every country and individual.

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

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.

Energy conservation is the foundation of energy independence.

The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.

Energy-saving technologies keep improving faster than they're applied, so efficiency is an ever larger and cheaper resource.

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.

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.

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.

What we've proven is that you can protect the environment, use it wisely and grow the economy and that there is no conflict between the two.

Local innovation and initiative can help us better understand how to protect our environment.

In the United States you use more oil than water. Water takes a few days to recycle. Oil takes 4 million years.