Jorgen Randers Quotes

Sustainability is a very tough thing in our government because there are so many different competing priorities.

If you develop in the old fashioned way there are enormous costs (to the environment)….but we have to demonstrate it, not just tell people.

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.

Really, the proper study of economics is fulfilment, not consumption... It doesn't even matter if it's a green product or a green house... It's still consumption. What matters in this world is the fulfilment of people's needs and the fulfilment of their aspirations.

If we don't make tough decisions today our children are going to have to make much, much tougher decisions tomorrow.

Civilization has given us enormous successes: going to the moon, technology. But then this is the civilisation that took us to debt, environmental crisis, every single crisis. We need a civilization where we say goodbye to these things.

Growth is a stupid goal. So, by the way, is no-growth.

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.

Sustainable development is the pathway to the future we want for all. It offers a framework to generate economic growth, achieve social justice, exercise environmental stewardship and strengthen governance.

We have to have a way of dealing with this that engenders confidence, trust, gives us every chance of getting the right outcome and boosts both sustainability and economic return at the same time.

We can have technology, prosperity, nice homes and cars, but at the same time we must be conscious of what we are dumping into the water, the air and our food.

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.

The only way forward, if we are going to improve the quality of the environment, is to get everybody involved.

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

If you look around the world, the countries with the best environmental practices are the wealthiest. There's a reason for that. If you're worried about where your next meal is going to come from or shelter over your head, your focus is on those things.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

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.

We must subject the machine—technology—to control and cease despoiling the earth and filling people with goodies merely to make money.

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

Conservation is not without a cost.

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.

They go together, a strong environment and a strong economy. In Florida the environment is the economy.

One of the hardest things in politics is getting a democracy to deal with something now where the payoff is long term or the price of inaction is decades away.

We have to prove to the disinherited majority of the world that ecology and conservation will not work against their interest but will bring an improvement in their lives.