Wangari Maathai Quotes

I think what the Nobel committee is doing is going beyond war and looking at what humanity can do to prevent war. Sustainable management of our natural resources will promote peace.

As to the Amazon itself, the transition from conservation to sustainable development was a huge awakening since conservation was a western concept and strategy to encourage the developing world to protect biodiversity resources for the sake of future generations and the wellbeing of the planet.

There is no economic imperative that will condemn us to deplete our vital resource base, but neither is there an invisible hand that will prevent us from doing so.

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.

If we care about the children, the grandchildren, the future generations, we need to make sure that they do not become the cannon fodder of the future.

In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.

A sustainable world means working together to create prosperity for all.

The Bio-diversity Convention has not yielded any tangible benefits to the world's poor.

The cost of our success is the exhaustion of natural resources, leading to energy crises, climate change, pollution, and the destruction of our habitat. If you exhaust natural resources, there will be nothing left for your children. If we continue in the same direction, humankind is headed for some frightful ordeals, if not extinction.

I think that our cooperative conservation approaches get people to sit down and grapple with problem solving.

We learned that economic growth and environmental protection can and should go hand in hand.

What is needed is the intelligent management of Earth's resources. If we really wish to put an end to our ongoing international and social problems, we must eventually declare Earth and all of its resources as the common heritage of all the world's people.

We're at peak oil, peak water, peak resources, and so either we figure it out and let science lead or we head down a very bad, dark trail to where a lot of people aren't going to make it.

It would be a mistake to believe that environmental protection and economic growth are mutually exclusive.

We protect nature not for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities.

The true path to peace is shared development. If we do not want war to go global, justice must go global

We will always have war until there is enough of every essential to support all lives everywhere around earth.

The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.

The road to conservation is paved with good intentions that often prove futile, or even dangerous, due to a lack of understanding of either land or economic land use.

I believe in a sound, strong environmental policy that protects the health of our people and a wise stewardship of our nation's natural resources.

We have to create a sustainable environment, worldwide, and we're not doing it. The best thing we can do with the rest of this century is aggressively acquire - and put aside - the richest natural reserves that we can, and then do our best to manage the needs and desires of the 11 billion people we expect to have by the end of the century. This is where biology is headed. For that reason, the sooner we get on with mapping biodiversity on Earth, the better off biology will be - not to mention the whole subject of saving it before we carelessly throw it away.

It's frustrating sometimes to see the mismatch in resources between the pointless and the urgent, isn't it. Like the gap between the vast resources poured into military technological research to make war more sophisticated, and the trickle that goes into developing techniques that might prevent war instead.

Conservation of our resources is the fundamental question before this nation, and that our first and greatest task is to set our house in order and begin to live within our means.

The task of saving the earth's environment must and will become the central organizing principle of the post-Cold War world.

Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.