Donella Meadows Quotes

Nature stopped being natural decades ago.

The common liberal orthodoxy that living close to the land leads to eco-awareness is historically naive, considering that Mesopotamia, northern Africa, and the Mayan civilization were ruined by people who had lived there quite a long while.

Wilderness is harder and harder to find these days on this beautiful planet, and we're abusing our planet to the point of almost no return.

There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

We humans are the greatest of earth's parasites.

Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.

Collective human actions are transforming, even ravaging, the biosphere - perhaps irreversibly - through global warming and loss of biodiversity.

I believe our biggest issue is the same biggest issue that the whole world is facing, and that's habitat destruction.

Human activity is having a major impact on the planet. We consume or have diverted a large proportion of the productivity of the land and oceans. Our hunger for land crowds out fellow species. Our waste products pollute the waters, warm the atmosphere and acidify the oceans.

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.

Civilization... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.

Apart from the most obvious cases, like the Oriental Bittersweet vine, escaped from private gardens and smothering the mountains one acre at a time, the most painful proof of man's destruction is not what you can see right in front of you; it's what you will never see again.

The human juggernaut is permanently eroding Earth's ancient biosphere.

Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore,, Currents of debris upon my breast.

Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, / For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. / America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, / And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.

If you're trashing your own country, ruining the soils, contaminating the waters and the air, cutting down trees, overfishing the lakes, rivers and oceans, you're not much of a patriot.

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

The Delaware Estuary has sustained a human population for thousands of years, but by the end of the 19th Century, increased population and industrialization had transformed much of the upper Estuary watershed.

Rapid population growth and technological innovation, combined with our lack of understanding about how the natural systems of which we are a part work, have created a mess.

So much of the habitat destruction and pollution is based on the simple principle that we somehow have been given free license over other species to degrade the planet.

We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly where, but I think it's back there at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment apart.

If we pollute the air, water and soil that keep us alive and well, and destroy the biodiversity that allows natural systems to function, no amount of money will save us.

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.

Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.