Edward Norton Quotes

Although it's difficult, if not impossible, to put a dollar value on the numerous services nature provides, leaving them out of economic calculations means they are often ignored.

We have to understand in value what the services of nature are so that we can understand that degrading them is an irreplaceable resource that no amount of money or human ingenuity can replace.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse.

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.

The government argues that without a price, the living world is accorded no value, so irrational decisions are made. By costing nature, you ensure that it commands the investment and protection that other forms of capital attract.

The more widely you can spread this notion of achieving ROI by preserving and improving ecosystems, the better.

Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.

Each generation takes the earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

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

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

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..

Ecology and economy are becoming inextricably entwined, and the world is becoming more conscious of this fact.

Everything depends on our ability to sustainably inhabit this earth, and true sustainability will require us all to change our way of thinking on how we take from the earth and how we give back.

We are putting value in the things that really are not valuable, things like commodities or disposable stuff that can bought, but the rainforest has been undervalued, because the value shouldn't be in the trees that you take out; it's should be with leaving the trees to preserve the life system that sustains life on the planet.

We need a philosophy for humans and nature to live together.

If we don't get sustainability right in agriculture first, it won't happen anywhere.

Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.

From every conceivable angle-economic social, cultural, public health, national defense-conservation of natural resources is an objective on which all should agree.

All economic activity is dependent upon that environment and its underlying resource base of forests, water, air, soil, and minerals. When the environment is finally forced to file for bankruptcy because its resource base has been polluted, degraded, dissipated, and irretrievably compromised, the economy goes into bankruptcy with it.

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

We protect nature not for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities.

In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.

The time has come to link ecology to economic and human development. When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. What is happening to the rain forests of Madagascar and Brazil will affect us all.

The wealth of the nation is its air, water, soil, forests, minerals, rivers, lakes, oceans, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats and biodiversity... that's all there is. That's the whole economy. That's where all the economic activity and jobs come from. These biological systems are the sustaining wealth of the world.