David Grinspoon Quotes

The Anthropocentic Age - the first age in which humankind is the dominant species on the planet - cuts both ways: it is up to us to destroy or save the planet. We certainly have the ability.

For how many people do you think might yet stand on this planet before the sun grows cold? That's the responsibility we hold in our hands.

The planet will adapt to anything. Maybe we should start to use the heart and the brain that we've been given to organize ourselves. Because if we keep screwing up things, we may be just passing by in the history of the planet.

The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.

In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

Politicians need a better understanding of global ecology. We need to be freed from our species-specific arrogance. No evidence exists that we are 'chosen', the unique species for which all the others were made. Nor are we the most important one because we are so numerous, powerful and dangerous.

I'm working in this very complex set of issues having to do with who we are as a species and how much we can do to the Earth before it starts to buckle under. My work can easily read as an indictment, but I don't see it as that simple a problem.

We seem to think we have some control over this planet.

The idea that we're somehow centrally important to the planet's existence is pretty comical - although I'd like us to be.

Earth was not built to serve the needs of humans.

It's nice to think about having everything natural and similar to pre-Columbian times.... In fact, man himself has long been part of that environment and there is no way to separate him from that environment.

We have all this very clever technology and all these abilities to manipulate the world in all these ways, yet we are faced with the very real question of whether we can be sustainable on this planet - whether or not, in fact, we can endure.

What I'm interested in is the conversations going on about the Anthropocene and what it means to view ourselves as a part of Earth's geological history.

Humanity has at least a dim, and growing, cognisance of the effects of its presence on this planet. The possibility that we might integrate that awareness into how we interface with the Earth system is one that should give us hope.

What I wonder most about the Anthropocene is not when did it start - but when, and how, will it end? Will it end? Or is it possible that our own growing awareness of our role on Earth can itself play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome toward one that we would desire?

We're adding a billion people every decade. We're just spin doctors. Whatever we do is supposedly great, and yet it's always at the expense of diversity and nature. We're like elephants. The ecology of the elephant is more similar to human than any other.

Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it.

I realize the answer is not to create wilderness and walk away.

It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness.

Fortunately, nature is as generous with its problems as Nobel with his fortune. The more we know, the more aware we are of what we know not.

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.

I am always struck by the fact that human awareness of our place in nature, like so much of modern science, began with the Industrial Revolution.

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.