Herman Daly Quotes

We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it.... That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-month basis, we would have been evicted long ago.

If we go on using the Earth uncaringly and without replenishing it, then we are just greedy consumers.

We called her Mother Earth. Because she gave birth to us, and then we sucked her dry.

We have, in a sense, lorded it over nature, over Sister Earth, over Mother Earth, i think man has gone too far.

If a man farms his land to the waste of the soil or the tress, he destroys not only his own assets but Nature's assets.

Our biggest moral debt is to the environment. Take-take-take, nothing given back.

Our earth is like a child who has grown up without parents, having no one to guide her... Some have attempted to help her but most have simply tried to use her. Humans, who have been given the task to lovingly steer the world, instead plunder her with no consideration, other than their immediate needs. And they give little thought for their own children who will inherit their lack of love. So they use her and abuse her with little consideration and then when she shudders of blows her breath. They are offended and raise their fist at God.

A way of life that ever more rapidly depletes the power of the Earth to sustain it and piles up ever more insoluble problems for each succeeding generation can only be called violent.

We are no longer inheriting the Earth from our parents, we are stealing it from our children.

If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

Civilization can never be sustainable.

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.”

It is clear to me that unless we connect directly with the earth, we will not have the faintest clue why we should save it.

You know that the air and water are being polluted, as is everything we touch and live with, and we go on corrupting the nature that we need. We don't realize we have a commitment to God to take care of nature. To cut down a tree, to waste water when there is so much lack of it, to let buses poison our atmosphere with those noxious fumes from their exhausts, to burn rubbish haphazardly-all that concerns our alliance with God.

The very fact that the planet is probably unsustainable with all that we've done to it and are doing to it, it's an appalling piece of evidence. It shows our complacency, our lack of passion or inclination to be authentic and really understand our true values. It's consistently depressing, but nevertheless, we carry on.

We've poisoned the air, the water, and the land. In our passion to control nature, things have gone out of control. Progress from now on has to mean something different. We're running out of resources and we are running out of time.

We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

Throughout history, human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize-destroy-move on.

We've have to heed our Biblical obligation to be good stewards of the Earth after leaving the Garden of Eden.

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners

Science has failed our mother Earth.

Organic agriculture is more about fairness and respect than it is about parts-per-billion of pesticide residues

Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present?