Yann Arthus-Bertrand Quotes

We must create a kind of globalization that works for everyone... and not just for a few.

The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

We face a dilemma because although everybody is better off than they've ever been at any time in our history, we've also got the biggest gap between the rich and the poor that we've ever had, and we've potentially got a planet which is going to go bust any day.

The problems of the Third World—its poverty, its ignorance, its debt—never really seemed to affect Europeans and Americans. No longer. It's a little warmer than it used to be. The water is rising.

We live on a planet of limited resources - an abstract notion for some of the world's population, but for many of the poorest and most vulnerable, those limits are all too real.

Pushing production out of America to nations without our environmental standards increases global environmental risks.

I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it.

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?

We are 5 percent of the global population and consume a third of the total resources - on some level we should all feel guilty relative to the world.

The human world is a long way from meeting the needs of the present, and it is borrowing massively from the future - not only by piling up money debt, but also by degrading the resources from which all real wealth ultimately comes.

The differences in income between the poor world and the rich world are so great that people have to be interested.

No one can say how long the process of human extinction might take, but as it proceeds, the same global order will prevail that always prevails: rich nations will find ways to protect themselves and make themselves comfortable, while the poor nations and the poor people of the planet will suffer.

We can not have equilibrium in this world with the current inequality and destruction of Mother Earth. Capitalism is what is causing this problem and it needs to end.

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.

All over the globe the U.S. is fighting to protect and develop at least a minority who consume what the U.S. majority can afford.

In the rich countries the poor expect a quantity and quality of commodities beyond the dreams of Louis XIV, while many of the so-called developing countries enjoy much higher economic growth rates than those of industrialized countries at a similar stage of their own histories.

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.

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

The reigning model of economic globalization threatens earth’s life systems, undermines cultural integrity and diversity, and endangers the lives of many who are poor in order that some might consume exorbitantly and a few accumulate vast wealth.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

The public domain has been squandered, our coal fields bartered away, our forests denuded, our people impoverished, and we are attempting to build a prosperous commonwealth among people who are being robbed of their homes.

Since the mid-1970s, people have been consuming more resources than the planet’s natural capital can replenish.

The environmental problems of developing countries are not the side effects of excessive industrialisation but reflect the inadequacy of development.

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

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.