Derrick Jensen Quotes

Unless we practice conservation, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.

If, in our haste to 'progress,' the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America. We cannot afford an America where expedience tramples upon esthetics and development decisions are made with an eye only on the present.

For too much of history, we've viewed the world's precious resources - both environmental and human - as things to extract, to make the most of in order to maximize their potential.

If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.

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.

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.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

The planet will adapt to anything. Maybe we should start to use the heart and the brain that we've been given to organize ourselves. Because if we keep screwing up things, we may be just passing by in the history of the planet.

Like I said, I'm more worried long term about the environmental issues then the use of arms.

We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly where, but I think it's back there at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment apart.

The most important question we have to deal with is a combination of population control and the control of our environment - how to utilize the world in as effective a way as we can for the future of mankind.

When I joined Ford, in the late 1970s, I felt strongly we could not forever be a huge user of natural resources without there being consequences. But I was alone in my thinking in those days.

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.

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.

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

We know it is impossible to go on finding, moving and wasting oil, leveling forests, paving land, dumping poisons, and multiplying our numbers. A new way of life, a new set of thoughts must be found.

Americans trash the planet not because we're evil, but because the industrial systems we've devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works.

If you look at the state of our planet, the next generations won't be around if we consider sustainability as a gimmick.

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

The more we exploit nature, The more our options are reduced, until we have only one: to fight for survival.

We've got to take care of the resources we have on this planet, because there's no resupply possible.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

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.”

How much longer, for instance, can we continue to crowd more and more people into this world? …. How long can we permit the uncontrolled use of the earth's resources when there is no possibility of replacing them? Indeed, how long will it be before we have completely used up everything our lives depend on? These issues are the politics of the future. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have begun to spell out in substantive fashion the means by which we can control population growth, environmental problems, and the conservation of our natural resources.