Peter Singer Quotes

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.

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

We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go.

Unfortunately, our affluent society has also been an effluent society.

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.

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.

The combination of population growth and the growth in consumption is a danger that we are not prepared for and something we will need global co-operation on.

America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?

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

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

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

The true cost to the world of a burger is far greater than the money you hand over to buy it.

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.

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

Whenever we engage in consumption or production patterns which take more than we need, we are engaging in violence.

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.

Consuming three planets' worth of resources when in fact we have one is the environmental equivalent of childhood obesity - eating until you make yourself sick.

Most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.

The strong evidence is that we're running out of space. We're collectively affecting the world's climate. This is due to the still-growing human population and our increase in consumption.

It is economically irrational to exclude large environmental costs from the balance sheets of the producers and the consumers. You are only kidding yourself if you export those costs on to society as a whole.

Every time we consume meat, eggs or dairy foods, we contribute to ecological devastation and the wasteful misuse of resources on a global scale.

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.

I think having toured the world and seeing many places, I've just been blown away by how we've really scarred our home. I'm as guilty as the next person if not more so. I travel a lot. The damage we do to our planet is huge.

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.