Louise Leakey Quotes

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.

Quite honestly, if we do manage to destroy the planet with our devil-may-care attitude to natural resources, I'd suggest we leave, as a dossier in our defence, the collected letters to agony aunts and uncles down the generations. It would certainly prove that we weren't all bad!

Human beings are just animals who will just eat and take advantage of any source of energy until it runs out, and then there'll be catastrophe.

It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness.

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.

We humans are the greatest of earth's parasites.

Relative to most of the energy and material flows on Earth, the machinations of humankind are puny. The planet's powers are much, much bigger than our own. But in a few sensitive places, we're making an impact on a planetary scale, and that impact is not a good one.

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.

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.

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 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.

Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

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.

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

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

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 has one cause above all others: the propensity of human beings to take the benefit and leave the costs to someone else, preferably someone far away in space or time, whose protests can be safely ignored.

We live on a human-dominated planet, putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on Earth.

I'm not looking ahead joyfully to the rest of my life or the future of the human race. I've always written about man as an animal species among other animals, competing for limited resources. Our population is exploding. Our environment is dying. Science has debunked God.

It is undeniable that the looming environmental crisis is partly the consequence of population growth.

The uncontrolled and rapacious exploitation of oil has led to unintended consequences, and if we continue on a similar trajectory with water, the oil crisis will seem like the trailer of some horrible disaster movie.

Humanity is a virus.

We've been playing in the sandbox of creation for millions of years. We ruin one environment, we move on to the next - manifest destiny. Now it's hitting us collectively: Our mother's life is in our hands.