Douglas Tompkins Quotes

The affluent society has become an effluent society. The 6 percent of the world's population in the United States produces 70 percent or more of the world's solid wastes

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

Somewhere along the way to free-market capitalism, the United States became the most wasteful society on the planet.

I feel humiliated that I live in a country that demands more already. Why do we cling to the notion that not only must we maintain the current level of consumption, but that it must continue to grow by an exponential factor of 2 to 7 percent every year?

When cattle ranchers clear rain forests to raise beef to sell to fast-food chains that make hamburgers to sell to Americans, who have the highest rate of heart disease in the world (and spend the most money per GNP on health care), we can say easily that business is no longer developing the world. We have become its predator.

The introduction of so powerful an agent as steam will make a great change in the situation of man.

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..

To join in the industrial revolution, you needed to open a factory; in the Internet revolution, you need to open a laptop.

For a while, I have had this theory that we, as a society, are coming to the end of the mass production, industrial phase of the human race.

If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making.

...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.

The industrial revolution in the new century is, in essence, a scientific and technological revolution, and breaking through the cutting edge is a shortcut to the building of an economic giant.

Nearly every country in the world is now becoming industrialized as rapidly as it can.

China has lunged into the 21st century, while India is still lurching toward it.

Compared to industry in Europe or Japan, where industry was based on a craft tradition, we are sadly behind.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

The situation the Earth is in today has been created by unmindful production and unmindful consumption. We consume to forget our worries and our anxieties. Tranquilising ourselves with over-consumption is not the way.

Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights.

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

I just think we're living in a time of massive, amazing change, like the Industrial Revolution on acid.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

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.

We're loving something to death in a way, which Americans tend to do a lot.

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.

But computers have changed the world for everyone, so there will be some way of working it out.