Edward Goldsmith Quotes

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.

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

The forests shall not be burned needlessly.

No-one wants polluted air, water or land, denuded forests or extinct animal species. But the error most people make is to trust the legislature to prevent these tragedies. What they don’t realize is how big a role the legislature has played historically in causing environmental destruction.

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

Environmental degradation and pollution constrain economic growth, contribute to large-scale migration, harm public health, and engender social unrest.

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.

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.

The landscape has been so transformed by ignorance, arrogance and greed that those who must prove their case are not those who call for forest protection, but those who call for business as usual.

The free market should not include the right to pollute our environment.

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

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.

We have very strong environmental laws in the United States and elsewhere around the world. The problem is that they're seldom enforced.

Although environmental groups sometimes raise issues in the confirmation process, environmental protection is not central to the fear-mongering of the liberal interest groups that oppose conservative judges. But the threat to basic environmental protections from conservative jurisprudence is broad-based and severe.

You name it - it is something every day from the Environmental Protection Agency, and every group I talk to is the same message: 'Please stop them. Please stop.'

If you're trashing your own country, ruining the soils, contaminating the waters and the air, cutting down trees, overfishing the lakes, rivers and oceans, you're not much of a patriot.

Many of the environmental rules not only fail to protect the natural environment, they actually increase the damage.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

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.

I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.

Further devastation of the air, land and sea is obviously a very real possibility, unless the attitudes of politicians and all who irresponsibly exploit our natural resources change significantly in the very near future and all collaborate and sacrifice for the good of the planet.

If you look at it ecologically, deforestation is high on the list of things which bring devastation. You cut down trees to build homes, for fuel, and you end up with no trees left, and you have to move on. If you take the earth as a whole, eventually there's nowhere to move on to.

I tell my environmental friends that they have won. Every issue we look at from an energy perspective is now also looked at from an environmental perspective.

The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.

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.