Richard Brown Quotes

No-one wants polluted air, water or land, denuded forests or extinct animal species. But the error most people make is to trust the legislature to prevent these tragedies. What they don’t realize is how big a role the legislature has played historically in causing environmental destruction.

You cannot, for instance, sustainably protect the environment if the majority of the people are still in primitive agriculture leading to the encroachment of forest reserves.

Yet, despite our many advances, our environment is still threatened by a range of problems, including global climate change, energy dependence on unsustainable fossil fuels, and loss of biodiversity.

We have serious challenges regarding climate change, unsustainable use of natural resources, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, forests and farmland. Not to mention the huge inequality still prevailing in several parts of the planet.

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

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

There probably were floods when our land was newly settled but before we cut our trees so recklessly they were not so serious. If we go to the headwaters of our rivers and we will find the cause and the results which follow in the wake of man's destructive ignorance.

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

What we're doing to the planet is inexcusable.

For 200 years we've been conquering nature. Now we're beating it to death.

Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.

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.

Let us face it, there is no law in any country - to my knowledge - that makes it illegal to clear-cut forests, nor to erode our topsoil, nor to generate greenhouse gases over and above that which can be absorbed by dwindling natural sinks. What is more, even if such laws were enacted, I can see no effective mechanism anywhere in the world for applying them.

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

We've raped our homelands to maintain our economies.

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

We're in a war, the war of industrial civilization against the natural world.

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

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

Environmental degradation and pollution constrain economic growth, contribute to large-scale migration, harm public health, and engender social unrest.

Even the wealth of the U.S. cannot protect against the levels of environmental destruction that we are unleashing.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Wouldn't it help Americans more, in the long run, if we were forced to accept some responsibility for the environmental wreckage we prefer to assume is totally out of our control?

Unless we keep this planet healthy, everything else is for naught.