Gro Harlem Brundtland Quotes

If we each take responsibility in shifting our own behavior, we can trigger the type of change that is necessary to achieve sustainability for our race or this planet. We change our planet, our environment, our humanity every day, every year, every decade, and every millennia.

Man is a complex animal; he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

The environment is more than just nature. The environment is peoples needs.

I think the greatest challenge in environmentalism and the most rewarding challenge is trying to figure out how humans can meet their needs while protecting the environment.

It's time to renew our commitment to the world around us.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

What we've proven is that you can protect the environment, use it wisely and grow the economy and that there is no conflict between the two.

We have to stop thinking about ourselves so much and start thinking about the environment. We have to change.

The natural capital is not income, but we spend our natural capital as if it were revenue, as if it were going to come back next year without any problems, whereas these renewals in nature can take hundreds of years.

The idea of a non-growing economy may be an anathema to an economist. But the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist.

People are beginning to realize that we need to live in accordance with the law of ecology, the law of finite resources, and if we don't, we're going to go extinct.

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.

We must subject the machine—technology—to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

We have changed our environment more quickly than we have learned how to change ourselves.

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

They go together, a strong environment and a strong economy. In Florida the environment is the economy.

Everything depends on our ability to sustainably inhabit this earth, and true sustainability will require us all to change our way of thinking on how we take from the earth and how we give back.

Good stewardship of the environment and our natural resources is necessary.

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.

The outgrowth of conservation, the inevitable result, is national efficiency.

Fuel conservation is a necessity, and I have to be the first person to set the example.

World-wide practice of Conservation and the fair and continued access by all nations to the resources they need are the two indispensable foundations of continuous plenty and of permanent peace.

The most important question we have to deal with is a combination of population control and the control of our environment - how to utilize the world in as effective a way as we can for the future of mankind.

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.

We have to understand in value what the services of nature are so that we can understand that degrading them is an irreplaceable resource that no amount of money or human ingenuity can replace.