Eckhart Tolle Quotes

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent.

I can't even consider the prospect of grandchildren because I don't know if there will be anything left for them on Earth. That's how serious the problem is. We can't drink the water or breathe the air, and we're all dying from some sort of cancer. How many generations can sustain that? It frightens me terribly.

What we're doing to the planet is inexcusable.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

Our massive tampering with the world's interdependent web of life—coupled with the environmental damage inflicted by deforestation, species loss, and climate change—could trigger widespread adverse effects, including unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems whose interactions and dynamics we only imperfectly understand. Uncertainty over the extent of these effects cannot excuse complacency or delay in facing the threats.

The whole of nature cries out at our mistreatment of her. If the planet were a patient, we would have treated her long ago.

Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?

Man has tried his suicide with bigotry and hate, but in the end he'll kill himself with nothing but his waste.

The current operating system [culture] is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. We're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behaviour. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behaviour. Time to call a tech! And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs.

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

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.

I think we can work through a lot of political and international problems, but what really frightens me is what's happening environmentally.

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

My generation has left the globe in a mess.

I always get involved with the environment because once you go past the tipping point with the environment, you don't get it back.

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.

Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.

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

We feel that the road to technology.... has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth

There's so much burying of heads in sand going on in the U.S., people are finally beginning to recognize that the environment is dying, but it's far too late, and I am conflicted.

We've poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We're running out of resources and we are running out of time.

On my 70th birthday, I was asked how I felt about mankind's prospects. This is my reply: We are behaving like yeasts in a brewer's vat, multiplying mindlessly while greedily consuming the substance of a finite world. If we continue to imitate the yeasts, we will perish as they perish, having exhausted our resources and poisoned ourselves in the lethal brew of our own wastes. Unlike the yeasts, we have a choice. What will it be?

This planet is our home and we're trashing and killing it.