John Kerry Quotes

We don't know exactly where all the tipping points are in the physical world for inescapable damage, but we're clearly reaching close to some of them.

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

We feel that the road to technology.... has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth

We're going to lose more species, acidify the oceans more, do damage that it will take millions of years - if not longer - to unwind. Exactly how much damage will we do? How deep will those scars run? We don't know yet. But we will turn the ship.

Big business is willing to destroy the planet for short-term profits

We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go.

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

We just can't afford to sit back and watch all that land be destroyed so a few people can get rich now. One of these days the dear old federal government is going to have to come in and spend billions of dollars just to repair the damage that's already been done. And guess who will have the machines and the workmen to do the job? The same coal operators who made the mess in the first place will be hired to fix it back, and the taxpayers will bear the cost

The biggest drag on global growth in the coming decade will be climate change and the failure to adequately deal with the consequences of poverty.

Our massive tampering with the world's interdependent web of life—coupled with the environmental damage inflicted by deforestation, species loss, and climate change—could trigger widespread adverse effects, including unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we only imperfectly understand. Uncertainty over the extent of these effects cannot excuse complacency or delay in facing the threats.

We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

The whole of nature cries out at our mistreatment of her. If the planet were a patient, we would have treated her long ago.

I always saw pollution as theft, and I always thought, 'Why should somebody be able to pollute the air, which belongs to all of us, or destroy a river or a waterway, which is supposed to belong to the whole community?'

We have screwed with our environment. We have a culture that's going crazy, and it's all being propelled by the trillion-dollar advertising corporations.

There's so much burying of heads in sand going on in the U.S., people are finally beginning to recognize that the environment is dying, but it's far too late, and I am conflicted.

Immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it.

We're terrible animals. I think that the Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us, as well it should.

We are upsetting the atmosphere upon which all life depends. In the late 80s when I began to take climate change seriously, we referred to global warming as a "slowmotion catastrophe" one we expected to kick in perhaps generations later. Instead, the signs of change have accelerated alarmingly.

Make the wrong choices now and future generations will live with a changed climate, depleted resources and without the green space and biodiversity that contribute both to our standard of living and our quality of life

Once the steam engine went away and we started moving into burning fossil fuels - not just burning them, but everything we do with oil - we've been experiencing [these problems] at an accelerated rate. The scary end-game scenario is getting closer and closer, about what we're going to be able to do to sustain life on this planet as we have come to know it. And I think this is a very real possibility, that we could be dealing with conditions we have no idea how to wrestle with.

This planet is our home and we're trashing and killing it.

The price of apparently cheap food is costing nothing less than the Earth!

Unless we stop dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours, which we are doing right now ... the continued acceleration of this pollution would destroy the future of human civilization.

The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.