Susan George Quotes

As a nation we have not yet come to have a proper respect for the forest and to regard it as an indispensable part of our resources—one which is easily destroyed but difficult to replace; one which confers great benefits while it endures, but whose disappearance is accompanied by a train of evil consequences not readily foreseen and positively irreparable.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Right now there should be a moratorium on the cutting down of old growth in this country. That is a small thing to ask at this point. There is only four percent of old growth left. Ninety-six percent of it has been cut down.

There's a basic kind of tension here. It's between those who say, I'd like to clear cut this forest and reduce it to saw timber because that's an economically productive thing for me to do.

There's a general culture in this country to cut all the trees. It makes me so angry because everyone is cutting and no one is planting.

It is shocking to smite down trees for mere decorations.

There probably were floods when our land was newly settled but before we cut our trees so recklessly they were not so serious. If we go to the headwaters of our rivers and we will find the cause and the results which follow in the wake of man's destructive ignorance.

Since the mid-1970s, people have been consuming more resources than the planet’s natural capital can replenish.

Sadly, it's much easier to create a desert than a forest.

Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.

We are aware only of the empty space in the forest, which only yesterday was filled with trees.

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.

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.

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?

The United States has consumed in the last 50 years more natural resources than the rest of the entire human race for all of history.

Our performance should be based on the long-term health of the land, rather than the number of board feet produced.

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

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

You cannot, for instance, sustainably protect the environment if the majority of the people are still in primitive agriculture leading to the encroachment of forest reserves.

Our forest policy is not to preserve forests because they are beautiful—though that is a good in itself—not to preserve them because they are refuges for wild creatures of the wilderness—though that is a good in itself—but rather to conserve them in order to guarantee a steady and continuous supply of timber, grass, and above all, water.

Every other civilized nation in the world has been compelled to care for its forests, and so must we if waste and destruction are not to go on to the bitter end, leaving America as barren as Palestine or Spain.

The world breaks a little bit every time we cut down a tree. It's so much easier to cut one down than to grow one. And so it's worth interrogating every time we do it.

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.

It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.

You should issue demerits for tree cutting or the destruction of humus.