John Taylor Gatto Quotes

Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

I've felt a little culpable that we entrepreneurs often invent businesses just to drive people to buy more things.

The United States has consumed in the last 50 years more natural resources than the rest of the entire human race for all of history.

If the rest of the world aspires to our way of life ... we'll bury ourselves in waste.

Superdevelopment leads to a throwaway society and to enormous waste. Excessive access to all kinds of things,—sometimes called consumerism—enslaves people and does not make them happy.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

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.

Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end..

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

We live in a world that is full of product. We have too much.

We are living and consuming more than we need, and this impacts our survival.

Recycling helps make people feel involved, and in some cases can be useful. Although you've got to do careful life history studies of what you're recycling. If all you're doing is recycling - if you've got three automobiles, and 10 children, and a 7,000-square-foot dot-com palace and second home up in the mountains that has to be heated - the recycling isn't making much difference.

All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm.

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners

Any child born into the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world will have an impact that is, on average, many times more destructive than that of a child born in the developing world.

We, all of us in the First World, have participated in something of a binge, a half century of unbelievable prosperity and ease. We may have had some intuition that it was a binge and the earth couldn't support it, but aside from the easy things (biodegradable detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn't do much. We didn't turn our lives around to prevent it. Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response - appropriate because we have marred a great, mad, profligate work of art, taken a hammer to the most perfectly proportioned of sculptures.

Those who consume far more resources than they require destroy the life chances of those whose survival depends upon consuming more.

I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.

There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.

It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass, and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here.

Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.

We are 5 percent of the global population and consume a third of the total resources - on some level we should all feel guilty relative to the world.

Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we've been doing it faster.

The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.