Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Quotes

The earth always belongs to the living.

The earth is one big interconnected entity. If you hurt a piece, you hurt the whole. If you hurt the people, you hurt the environment.

We desperately need to recognise that we are the guests, not the masters, of nature and adopt a new paradigm for development, based on the costs and benefits to all people, and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than the limits of technology and consumerism.

The first rule of sustainability is to align with natural forces, or at least not try to defy them.

We need to start looking at having a way of managing the whole ecosystem, because you can't pick away at it piece by piece, you have to truly start being coordinated and managing our resources as a system. We haven't gotten to that point yet.

We owe it to each other - and to our children and grandchildren - to leave our planet in a better state than when we found it.

The earth and its resources belong of right to its people.

Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.

Conservation means the wise use of the earth and its resources for the lasting good of men.

The idea that we're somehow centrally important to the planet's existence is pretty comical - although I'd like us to be.

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.

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

Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.

We need what I have often called an ecological approach to the management of these resources and we do not have that now. We have the inertia of past habits, unsustainable habits.

We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity.

Conservation of land and conservation of people frequently go hand in hand

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

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

The earth belongs in usufruct to the living.

That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics..

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

I have never believed we had to choose between either a clean and safe environment or a growing economy. Protecting the health and safety of all Americans doesn’t have to come at the expense of our economy’s bottom line. And creating thriving companies and new jobs doesn’t have to come at the expense of the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, or the natural landscape in which we live. We can, and indeed must, have both.

The only legacy I seek is the one that any grandparent seeks - that is, to hand off our nation... our fields and our farms to the next generation in better shape than we found it.

We always have to remind ourselves of how fragile life on this planet is and what responsibilities we have.

The mistake is to think that clever technology can solve everything, but it can't solve our relationship with nature, which is where I think it's gone wrong in that we have somehow abandoned our proper connection with nature.