John Richards Quotes

The oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it..

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.

Nature is the mother and the habitat of man, even if sometimes a stepmother and an unfriendly home.

For too much of history, we've viewed the world's precious resources - both environmental and human - as things to extract, to make the most of in order to maximize their potential.

Fundamentally, if you look at where the environmental issues are coming from, it's all because of humans and our impact on the environment, so while it's true that one individual is not going to sufficiently fix the environment, it is a necessary thing.

I like the outdoors and the natural world. Environmental issues.

Mother Nature is not sweet.

Environmental policy must strike a balance between the earth's best interests and our citizen's pressing needs.

Man is complex—he makes deserts bloom and lakes die.

Ecology has become the political substitute for the word "motherhood.

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?

In the long term the economy and the environment are the same thing. If it is unenvironmental it is uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.

Man's war against nature is a war against himself.

Nature does not have the capacity to heal all the wounds that have been inflicted upon it by mankind.

The environment is more than just nature. The environment is peoples needs.

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

Our conservation laws are based on static ideas about nature—not landscapes that are rapidly changing because of something humans did.

Nature is nobody's ally.

human ecology

I think the growing disregard for the environment, culture, and heritage is a natural consequence of capitalism.

When you look for the environment, you find things that are in it: a hammer, a smartphone, some rusty nails, a shed, a spider, some grass, a tree. So there is a big difference between environmentality and Nature. Nature is definitely something you can point to: it is 'over yonder' in the mountains, in my DNA, under the pavement.

If I was an alien looking down at Earth and studying the way we've treated the planet, would I really think humans are worthy of all these resources? Probably not.

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

I never lose an opportunity to speak about my obsession: humankind and the environment.