Clay Shirky Quotes

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 treat a planet at crisis point as an externality that can be shunted into a future generation. We continue to act as if we had the natural resources of several planets, not one.

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 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.

Both the United States and the world economy have already reached - and surpassed - their sustainable physical limits. Ground water is being drawn down, soils eroded, forests cut faster than they grow, fish caught faster than they reproduce, non-renewable fossil fuels burnt without developing substitutes.

A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.

The only thing that can save us as a species is seeing how we're not thinking about future generations in the way we live.

I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety.

And I know that the younger generation is doing things that are so ingenious. And for them it's not a matter of a political belief or an environmental stance. It's really just common sense.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that's based on the use of non-renewable resources won't last.

The more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.

People are beginning to realize that we need to live in accordance with the law of ecology, the law of finite resources, and if we don't, we're going to go extinct.

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?

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.

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.

Humanity stands ... before a great problem of finding new raw materials and new sources of energy that shall never become exhausted. In the meantime we must not waste what we have, but must leave as much as possible for coming generations.

As a global community, we have to start thinking more seriously about whether there are limits to what our earth can bear and if we're willing to cope with the struggle for limited resources, which only seem to increase as our population does.

We can't continue to take from our planet the way we do and not give anything back, and the idea of, 'Oh, but it's fine, I won't have to deal with it in my lifetime,' well, you need to think about the future generations who will have to deal with it.

We've been given the gift of a billion years of cosmic time, and we should not screw it up. But at the rate we're using up our planet's natural resources and fouling our own nest means we're not going to last a billion years.

When we look as a society, we've really lost the connection between our actions and the future.

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

It took Britain half the resources of the planet to achieve its prosperity; how many planets will a country like India require?

Despite our very recent appearance on the planet, humanity combines arrogance with increasing material demands, even as we become more numerous. Our toughness is a delusion. Have we the intelligence and discipline to vigilantly guard against our tendency to grow without limit?

What we are doing is, rather than living on the interest of our basic biological capital, we're using up our capital, so we're dipping into our capital. We're using up what should be our children's and grandchildren's legacy.

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.