Roger Scruton Quotes

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.

Perhaps it has been too uncomfortable for those with vested interests to acknowledge, but we have spent the best part of the past century enthusiastically testing the world to utter destruction; not looking closely enough at the long-term impact our actions will have.

China is bearing the environmental cost for much of the world because China is the factory of the world.

We are living beyond our means. As a people we have developed a life-style that is draining the earth of its priceless and irreplaceable resources without regard for the future of our children and people all around the world.

What we are doing is, rather than living on the interest of our basic biological capital, we're using up our capital, so we're dipping into our capital. We're using up what should be our children's and grandchildren's legacy.

I think my message to the politicians who have within their power the ability to make change is, 'Do you really, really not care about the future of your great-grandchildren? Because if we let the world continue to be destroyed the way we are now, what's the world going to be like for your great-grandchildren?'

I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.

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.

Once humans traded their hunter-gatherer existences for more settled communities, we began a quest to make our lives better and more comfortable, but we've also been sucking precious finite resources from our environment ever since.

Human society sustains itself by transforming nature into garbage.

What we are doing to the future of our children, and the other species on the planet, is a clear moral issue.

We are borrowing money from future generations. We are borrowing the carbon impact, the resource impact from future generations to get stuff cheap now. We have swept the dirt and dust from our society under the carpet - but this carpet is on other side of the planet.

There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world.

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.

Since the mid-1970s, people have been consuming more resources than the planet’s natural capital can replenish.

Markets are lethal, if only because of ignoring externalities, the impacts of their transactions on the environment.

We can't continue to take from our planet the way we do and not give anything back, and the idea of, 'Oh, but it's fine, I won't have to deal with it in my lifetime,' well, you need to think about the future generations who will have to deal with it.

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

We treat a planet at crisis point as an externality that can be shunted into a future generation. We continue to act as if we had the natural resources of several planets, not one.

Regardless of what we consume, the sheer volume of consumption is overwhelming the Earth's living systems.

Business is destroying the world, with flair, expertise, and panache.

Pushing production out of America to nations without our environmental standards increases global environmental risks.

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 live in a disposable society. We throw so much away. But it doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from the planet and it comes from future generations' lives.

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.