Jane Goodall Quotes

Poverty and backwardness in the midst of clear waters and verdant mountains is no good, nor is it to have prosperity and wealth while the environment deteriorates.

Advanced industrialised economies like ourselves cannot afford to go on growing, particularly if we want to give people in poorer countries a chance of being able to at least meet their basic needs.

We already have - thanks to technology, development, skills, the efficiency of our work - enough resources to satisfy all human needs. But we don't have enough resources, and we are unlikely ever to have, to satisfy human greed.

I've often said that far more sensible than a 'make poverty history' campaign would be a 'make wealth history' campaign. It is, after all, the wealthy people who do all the damage. The less money you earn, the fewer resources you use up.

Commercial institutions, proud of their achievements, do not see that healthy living systems - clean air and water, healthy soil, stable climates - are integral to a functioning economy. As our living systems deteriorate, traditional forecasting and business economics become the equivalent of house rules on a sinking cruise ship.

I sense very little appetite for green efforts to persuade people to accept a frozen or declining standard of living for the sake of the environment. Recessions remind us that economic retreat or stagnation is painful, whatever the goal.

We can survive as a population only if we conserve, develop sustainably, and protect the world's resources.

We say we need to clean up the environment; to clean up the environment, we need to be richer. But maybe getting richer is actually making us poorer.

Resources businesses must contribute to sustainable development if we are to continue to have access to resources.

Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.

For a long time, rich countries have promised to reduce poverty but have failed to match their words with adequate action. Of course, some important progress has been made and millions of lives have been saved, but millions more could be saved.

The earth only has so much bounty to offer and inventing ever larger and more notional prices for that bounty does not change its real value.

It is only through developing and maximizing all its natural resources that a sustainable future for Africa and its people can be secured.

It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.

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.

Pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources depend and will depend in the future on the absolute level of total economic activity. This means that is necessary to restrain both the rate of growth of population and, at least in the developed countries, the rate of growth of consumption per head.

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.

How much longer, for instance, can we continue to crowd more and more people into this world? …. How long can we permit the uncontrolled use of the earth's resources when there is no possibility of replacing them? Indeed, how long will it be before we have completely used up everything our lives depend on? These issues are the politics of the future. Neither Republicans nor Democrats have begun to spell out in substantive fashion the means by which we can control population growth, environmental problems, and the conservation of our natural resources.

What does peace mean in a world in which the combined wealth of the world's 587 billionaires exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries?

… authors generally neglect that growth has lifted billions of people out of grinding poverty and that others may remain poor because of the developed world’s environmental concerns …

For too long, the world has been focused on short-term growth and development at the expense of our long-term survival as we have depleted our natural resources at historically reckless rates.

We cannot eliminate poverty without enabling developing countries to engage more people in economic activity that use natural resources, and we cannot resolve runaway climate change without creating wealth in a more equitable and less carbon intensive way.

Nobody in the developing world is going to take, as an answer to their aspirations, the developed world's reply: 'Sorry, you can't; we've already used it all up.' To earn the right to look the developing world in the eye and start this conversation, we need a reassessment of how we live and what we want.

GDP has been a con perpetrated upon the poor of the world: a measure of economic activity and not of actual wealth. What it masks is the way in which we transform their natural capital into our consumption through international rules that regard the ecosystem services upon which they rely as mere externalities.

The problem the world faces today is that only one-third of the world's population lives in decent circumstances, while half the population of the world lives on one or two dollars a day. And even as we have this poverty and backwardness, we are facing a global environmental crisis. We need developmental models that will take into account the specific and unique position of each country and at the same time will address the environmental crisis.