Lewis Gordon Pugh Quotes

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.

I haven't inherited the earth from my parents, I am borrowing it from my children.

What we owe future generations is the subject of growing debate by economists, philosophers, ethicists, public policymakers, and academics of all stripes. But for me as a mother, the moral implications are very clear. We owe them clean air and fresh water, a healthy planet and a secure future.

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.

I gone on for years about the importance of thinking about the long term in relation to the environmental damage, climate change, and everything else because we don’t want to hand on an increasingly dysfunctional world to our grandchildren and I do not want to be confronted by my future grandchild saying, “Well why didn’t you do something?”

I think about the world that we leave behind for our children.

As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.

Future generations are not going to ask us what political party were you in. They are going to ask what did you do about it, when you knew the glaciers were melting.

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 nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.

Land is not something you inherit from your parents. It is something you borrow from your children.

Rather than rewarding today’s voters with benefits financed by future generations, as Congress typically does, solving the climate problem will require costly actions now to protect those who will follow us.

When you run a company, you want to hand it off in better shape than you found it. In the same way, just as we shouldn't leave our children or grandchildren with mountains of national debt and unsustainable entitlement programs, we shouldn't leave them with the economic and environmental costs of climate change.

Sometimes I wake at 2 A.M. worrying that my great-granddaughter will have to march through her distant, broiling future gathering all the plastic I ever disposed of.

If you have children, you worry about the world you're leaving them.

We gotta leave a better planet for our kids. And I would say we gotta leave better kids for our planet as well.

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, the present generation, have the responsibility to act as a trustee of the rich natural wealth for the future generations. The issue is not merely about climate change; it is about climate justice.

For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.

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

We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations

The ecological crisis shows the urgency of a solidarity which embraces time and space... A greater sense of intergenerational solidarity is urgently needed. Future generations cannot be saddled with the cost of our use of common environmental resources.

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

If you think about your and my grandchildren, this is what really worries me. I don't want them - if I'm still alive by then - to say, 'Why didn't you do something about it?', when you could have done.