Scott Westerfeld Quotes

We’re turning everything on the planet into food for humans so we’re cutting down the rainforests, displacing all of the animals, and we’re doing all this to feed humans... ... Imagine if there were only 2 billion people polluting? We’re already overpopulated. I feel we’ve become a parasite on this planet. If this population keeps growing, we’ll just keep devouring the planet, and I don’t think it’s going to stand for that very long.

Humans have grown like a cancer. We're the biggest blight on the face of the earth.

The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.

Rapid population growth and technological innovation, combined with our lack of understanding about how the natural systems of which we are a part work, have created a mess.

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.

The causal chain of the deterioration (of the environment) is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide---all can be traced easily to too many people.

humanity is a cancer on the body of the world

Humanity, in the desperate attempt to fit 8 billion or more people on the planet and give them a higher standard of living, is at risk of pushing the rest of life off the globe.

We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.

Trees are massacred, houses go up — faces, faces everywhere. Man is spreading. Man is the cancer of the earth.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

Human beings are so destructive. I sometimes think we're a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that's our function. Maybe every few eons, some animal comes along that kills off the rest of the world, clears the decks, and lets evolution proceed to its next phase.

Human use, population, and technology have reached that certain stage where mother Earth no longer accepts our presence with silence.

Understanding is becoming aware of the fact that civilization itself is in trouble and we have done it by overpopulating the planet, and by moving toward self-service and greed. These sort of things are directly the wrong approach.

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.

The strong evidence is that we're running out of space. We're collectively affecting the world's climate. This is due to the still-growing human population and our increase in consumption.

I don't think the planet can survive people. It's not the other way around. I don't think the planet can survive.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

The situation the Earth is in today has been created by unmindful production and unmindful consumption. We consume to forget our worries and our anxieties. Tranquilising ourselves with over-consumption is not the way.

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while.