Narendra Modi Quotes

As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater.

Population growth and development place additional stress on the Nation's water infrastructure and its ability to sustain hard-won water quality gains.

In D.C., I've passed amendments to allocate $6.3 million to keep our waterways open for business, $1 million as a down payment on our wetland restoration - our natural storm protection - and $5 million to ensure that drilling permits are reviewed thoroughly and efficiently.

I think the Netherlands will become one big city at a point. It is inevitable when you live in a country with so many people. You cannot afford to leave nature as it is. Some people believe that the dunes should be left in their original state, but I think it's strange to let things become how they were 500 years ago.

Cities are, first of all, seats of the highest economic division of labor.

Many of them are doing it because they are concerned about smart growth.

Aside from its parks and nature areas, Singapore is intensively developed, and due to the shortage of land, is building up, down and on manmade islands and landfills.

I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.

Business was bound to come; light industries were already shopping for land. The quiet country farms were already going, and developments would take over... Eventually, of course, we will have to have some sort of plan to guide future development.

To create a housing shortage in a huge country, heavily wooded, with a small population—ah, that's proof of pure political genius.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

Farmers had resisted transfers of water to cities at least since California’s water wars a century ago..

Part of the population of Laos lives in urban centers, Vientiane being the largest.

The sugar industry doesn't want to see more of the agricultural areas turned into storm-water treatment areas. Ultimately they want to develop that land for houses and a shopping center.

The population explosion is an ecological phenomenon of displacement. Unless we solve that ecological problem of displacing people - to build huge dams, to build motorways, to take away what people need in order to survive - we will keep pumping more and more money into population programs. We will have more and more coercive and violent methods through which women's bodies are treated as experimental grounds for new contraceptives. Yet we will not have a solution to the problem of numbers.

The more people there are, the more food we need, the more space we occupy, the more resources and consumer goods we wish to have and the more development has to take place

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Overpopulation in various countries has become a serious threat to the health of people and a grave obstacle to any attempt to organise peace on this planet

China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.

The industrial revolution fueled all of humanity, everything we do has been exploding ever since. It's been the biggest most impacting thing, not only for human beings in the last 250 million years, but also the planet, which caused the ice age, which buried the forest. It's this circle because of the industrial revolution, it's neither good or bad, it enabled all of modernization, extended our life, it changed everything. It's the most impactful thing that happened to the planet and the people.

All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.

If the world were not so full of people, and most of them did not have to work so hard, there would be more time for them to get out and lie on the grass, and there would be more grass for them to lie on.

Industry is the root of all ugliness.

One particular spark was when I went back to my favorite spot in the mountains where my father always used to take us before my graduate studies in Canada and finding that the stream I had gone swimming in wasn’t there. The forest had been converted into an apple orchard with World Bank financing. The entire place, literally, had changed.

Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over - unless we find new ways of producing energy.