William Commanda Quotes

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.

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

My generation has left the globe in a mess.

We're not environmentally doing very good things to this planet, and we might not be around too long.

We speak often of 'destroying the planet' when what we mean is destroying its habitability for humans.

This planet is our home and we're trashing and killing it.

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.

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

What we're doing to the planet is inexcusable.

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.

The threat to the planet is us. It's actually not a threat to the planet - it's a threat to us.

By burning fossil fuels, we are already dumping 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, which has a profound effect on the climate. So, like it or not, we're already messing with a system we don't understand.

I always get involved with the environment because once you go past the tipping point with the environment, you don't get it back.

If you look at the state of our planet, the next generations won't be around if we consider sustainability as a gimmick.

The narrative of progress is no longer sustainable.

The causal chain of the deterioration (of the environment) is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide---all can be traced easily to too many people.

We treat a planet at crisis point as an externality that can be shunted into a future generation. We continue to act as if we had the natural resources of several planets, not one.

We're going to stop looking at Earth from orbit because we don't like what we are seeing and the conclusions that leads us to? That's nonsense.

There's so much burying of heads in sand going on in the U.S., people are finally beginning to recognize that the environment is dying, but it's far too late, and I am conflicted.

Once the steam engine went away and we started moving into burning fossil fuels - not just burning them, but everything we do with oil - we've been experiencing [these problems] at an accelerated rate. The scary end-game scenario is getting closer and closer, about what we're going to be able to do to sustain life on this planet as we have come to know it. And I think this is a very real possibility, that we could be dealing with conditions we have no idea how to wrestle with.

It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology.

The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.

Climate change represents the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen

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

Wouldn't it help Americans more, in the long run, if we were forced to accept some responsibility for the environmental wreckage we prefer to assume is totally out of our control?