Laurence J. Peter Quotes

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

Man's war against nature is a war against himself.

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

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

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

Fundamentally, if you look at where the environmental issues are coming from, it's all because of humans and our impact on the environment, so while it's true that one individual is not going to sufficiently fix the environment, it is a necessary thing.

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.

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 have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

The great task for environmental historians is to record and analyze the effects of man's recently achieved control over the natural world. What is needed is a longer-term global, comparative, historical perspective that treats the environment as a meaningful variable.

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

I do believe this period of the 1980's will be remembered as the time the planet struck back. The planet is telling us we can't treat it this way anymore.

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

Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

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.”

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.

It is not enough to celebrate the earth and all its inhabitants, we must restore what we have destroyed.

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.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

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

Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.

The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.