Sonny Rollins Quotes

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

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

I was always aware that this whole Earth is on overload.

I think its time to change and balance the environment and growth. If we don't do that, we're going to suffer a hard landing one day very soon.

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.

Further devastation of the air, land and sea is obviously a very real possibility, unless the attitudes of politicians and all who irresponsibly exploit our natural resources change significantly in the very near future and all collaborate and sacrifice for the good of the planet.

I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.

Perhaps it has been too uncomfortable for those with vested interests to acknowledge, but we have spent the best part of the past century enthusiastically testing the world to utter destruction; not looking closely enough at the long-term impact our actions will have.

The situation the Earth is in today has been created by unmindful production and unmindful consumption. We consume to forget our worries and our anxieties. Tranquilising ourselves with over-consumption is not the way.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

Environmental disaster is the gravest threat to China's continued development. That's according to me, but it is not some wacko view.

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

It's a war, I think, to save the planet, really, from ourselves.

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.

The plundering for profit of the world's natural resources has threatened the very sustainability of the planet.

We treat a planet at crisis point as an externality that can be shunted into a future generation. We continue to act as if we had the natural resources of several planets, not one.

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

I think my message to the politicians who have within their power the ability to make change is, 'Do you really, really not care about the future of your great-grandchildren? Because if we let the world continue to be destroyed the way we are now, what's the world going to be like for your great-grandchildren?'

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

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.

If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect.

The environment will continue to deteriorate until pollution practices are abandoned.

How we are using up our home, how we are living and polluting the planet is frightening. It was evident when I was a child. It's more evident now.

The destruction of our environment and resources cannot be stemmed unless the growth of the world's population is stemmed and ultimately reduced.