Helene D. Gayle Quotes

Climate change and global poverty are two sides of the same coin. Both challenges must be addressed together. If we fail on one, we will also fail on the other.

We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further, and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people. Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?

The living conditions of the poor must be improved if we really want to save our environment

The chief moral obligation of the 21st Century is to build a green economy that is strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Those communities that were locked out of the last century's pollution-based economy must be locked into the new, clean and renewable economy. Our youth need green-collar jobs, not jails.

You can't tackle climate change until you tackle poverty.

My advice to everybody would be to go out as much as possible and deal with social inequality and environmental degradation because these issues are increasingly prescient.

Sustainable South Bronx advocates for environmental justice through sustainable environmental and economic development projects.

An economy growing at 7 percent per year, can and must find the resources to improve the lives of its millions of poor.

At CARE, a leading humanitarian organization, we recognize people live their lives in a holistic manner. Issues such as health care, education and economic empowerment cannot be addressed in a vacuum. Thus, effective programs need to tackle the multiple root causes of poverty.

The main environmental challenge of the 21st century is poverty. When you don't know where your next meal is coming from, it's hard to consider the environment 100 years down the line.

You must not embark on programs to curb economic growth without placing a priority on maintaining income, so that the poorest people won’t simply be further depressed in their condition but will have a share, and be able to live decently.

It is futile to seek solutions to environmental disturbances without considering them from a broad perspective that encompasses the factors underlying world poverty and the inequities within and among nations.

A generation of entrepreneurs will mop up poverty at a rate that no government ever could.

From a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation.

My main aim is poverty reduction in the state.

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

In a world of massive wealth and income inequality, Europe must support Greece’s efforts to build an economy which creates more jobs and income, not more unemployment and suffering.

The heart of the matter, as I see it, is the stark fact that world poverty is primarily a problem of two million villages, and thus a problem of two thousand million villagers.

The problem the world faces today is that only one-third of the world's population lives in decent circumstances, while half the population of the world lives on one or two dollars a day. And even as we have this poverty and backwardness, we are facing a global environmental crisis. We need developmental models that will take into account the specific and unique position of each country and at the same time will address the environmental crisis.

You can't help the poor by becoming one of them.

Poor people of all colors are getting poorer and our communities are getting more toxic. There is a misconception that to grow our economy we will have to do business as usual, because cleaning up the environment, mitigating climate change is just too costly. Well, I say the business of poverty is just too expensive a bill for humanity to pay any longer.

All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.

Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.

I want a different world. One where I don't wake up thinking I'm so lucky to be able to feed my daughter, and able to give people a clean drink of water. I don't want images of starving babies at the breast in my mind. I want that to change. And if I want that, I had better do something about it.

I have never witnessed poverty like I did in Haiti. The kind that is so deep and wide-reaching that it feels impossible to make a difference. But I found that lives can and are being changed. It may take a lot of work and time but Concern has, and continues to make, serious progress because they stayed long after the world moved on.