Magnus Larsson Quotes

We're stuck in the concrete age. Concrete has really become this ever-present material that's almost impossible to get away from. It's cheap, abundant, and easy to work with, and to an extent, that's good.

Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

We in the industrialized world make a greater difference because our ecological footprint, our impact on the condition of the environment, is 40 to 50 times larger than that of people in the developing world.

… human population growth within the ecosystem was closely analogous to the growth of malignant tumor cells within an organism: that man was acting like a cancer on the biosphere. The multiplication of human numbers certainly seems wild and uncontrolled... Four million a month - the equivalent of the population of Chicago... We seem to be doing all right at the moment; but if you could ask cancer cells, I suspect they would think they were doing fine. But when the organism dies, so do they; and for our own, selfish, practical, utilitarian reasons, I think we should be careful about how we influence the rest of the ecosystem.

Tearing down an old house and building a new one is the most wasteful thing we do as humans.

Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.

People in cities may forget the soil for as long as a hundred years, but Mother Nature's memory is long and she will not let them forget indefinitely.

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.

Pollution is a serious one. Water pollution, air pollution, and then solid hazardous waste pollution. And then beyond that, we also have the resources issue. Not just water resources but other natural resources, the mining resources being consumed, and the destruction of our ecosystem.

It feels like an easy sum to gauge the balance between forests and, say, the proliferating free newspapers that litter our public transport. This noxious combination of words and paper represents a clear-cut crime against the biosphere.

We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.

I tell my environmental friends that they have won. Every issue we look at from an energy perspective is now also looked at from an environmental perspective.

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.

Cities are 2% of the earth's crust, but they are 50% of the world's population.

Consumption may be regarded as negative production.

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

Scientists and supercomputers have amplified our ability to look ahead. For decades, experts have warned us that human numbers, technology, hyper-consumption and a global economy are altering the chemical, geological, and biological properties of the biosphere.

As the population of Georgia increased dramatically, so did development.

In many developing countries environmental problems are relegated to the periphery because they do not appear to be as urgent as other issues … We cannot survive without clean drinking water, food and pure air. Environmental concerns are not a luxury in Africa.

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.

There must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain.

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.