Vivienne Westwood Quotes

The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.

We are using resources as if we had two planets, not one. There can be no 'plan B' because there is no 'planet B.'

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

Since the mid-1970s, people have been consuming more resources than the planet’s natural capital can replenish.

It is undeniable that the looming environmental crisis is partly the consequence of population growth.

Climate change is the environmental challenge of this generation, and it is imperative that we act before it's too late.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

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.

All the conservation efforts in the world won't be enough to make a dent in the oncoming sustainability crisis our planet faces.

Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority.

The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.

I think the environmental problem will be the number one item on the agenda of the 21st century... This is a problem that cannot be postponed.

Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system.

Whether the process proves to be Kyoto or something else, let's acknowledge the urgency of global warming.

The newspaper headlines may shout about global warming, extinctions of living species, the devastation of rain forests, and other worldwide catastrophes, but Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents.

As fears about the energy and environmental crises reach a fever pitch, we're all searching for solutions. And one possibility is that we could fix everything if we'd just shrink our population back down to about 2 billion people - which would put us roughly where we were at 80 years ago.

The language 'It's too late' is very unsuitable for most environmental issues. It's too late for the dodo and for people who've starved to death already, but it's not too late to prevent an even bigger crisis. The sooner we act on the environment, the better.

There are real and growing dangers to our simple and most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we bring, and the land which sustains us.... If we do not act, the world of the year 2000 will be much less able to sustain life than it is now.

Global warming and climate change is a big problem. It requires a big solution.

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.

If we don't change, our species will not survive... Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

The biggest drag on global growth in the coming decade will be climate change and the failure to adequately deal with the consequences of poverty.

We've been given the gift of a billion years of cosmic time, and we should not screw it up. But at the rate we're using up our planet's natural resources and fouling our own nest means we're not going to last a billion years.

Climate change is putting pressures on the resources we need to survive: water; agricultural land; food.