Walter S. Howard Quotes

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

We in the industrialized world make a greater difference because our ecological footprint, our impact on the condition of the environment, is 40 to 50 times larger than that of people in the developing world.

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.

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.

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.

The fact is that seven per cent of the global population emits 50 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, and the proportions are the same for the use of energy and raw materials, meat, wood, etc. Simply put, an infinitesimal minority consumes the most and imposes damage on the overwhelming majority, while asking it to change.

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.

The world's richest half billion people - that's about seven per cent of the global population - are responsible for fifty per cent of the world's emissions.

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

The causal chain of the deterioration (of the environment) is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide---all can be traced easily to too many people.

Humanity is consuming the resources of the earth and life in an excessive and disordered way, forgetting the earth's own needs

People are getting richer all over the world and they are going to want to live the way Americans live. And that is going to place a big strain on our environment and will be a great challenge.

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.

Western countries have gone through their development cycle and enjoyed the fruits of ruining the environment over many years and are now giving us homilies and pontificating on responsibilities to the environment. I think they need to look inward.

Tearing down an old house and building a new one is the most wasteful thing we do as humans.

Immense wealth translates automatically into immense environmental impacts, regardless of the intentions of those who possess it.

There are too many people, that's why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff.

With its array of gadgets and machines, all powered by energies that are destructive of land or air or water, and connected to work, market, school, recreation, etc., by gasoline engines, the modern home is a veritable factory of waste and destruction. It is the mainstay of the economy of money. But within the economies of energy and nature, it is a catastrophe. It takes in the world's goods and converts them into garbage, sewage, and noxious fumes-for none of which have we found a use.

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.

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

We assume that everything's becoming more efficient, and in an immediate sense that's true; our lives are better in many ways. But that improvement has been gained through a massively inefficient use of natural resources.

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.