Paul Polman Quotes

Governments at all levels and the whole society should act more vigorously to protect the land our lives depend on.

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

I maintain that if there is such a thing as a true and honest environmentalist, it's people like Slim and hopefully me, who have been caretakers of the land all our lives, along with the generations before us.

If we didn't have a sustainable agriculture industry, who would be paying the then-missing taxes to support our defence, police, roads, airports, elderly, parks, public sporting facilities and much more?

Land is a great example of how we can manage and invest in sustainable infrastructure for economic, social, and environmental gains. Its use - and misuse - is at the heart of the challenge for food, fuel, and fibre.

We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

We're not going to persuade people in the developing world to go without, but neither can we afford a planet on which everyone lives like an American. Billions more people living in suburbs and driving SUVs to shopping malls is a recipe for planetary suicide. We can't even afford to continue that way of life ourselves.

I try to leave a light footprint. I'm involved with Global Green, which aims to educate people about sustainable building and the greening of schools. I try to be aware about the consumption of unnecessary things in a consumptive culture.

We want to use the environment to shift the way our society works.

For millions of years, this world has been a great gift to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air, water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us - the big us, including forests and oceans, species large and small - to flourish.

We don't need a War on Carbon. We need a new prosperity that can be shared by all while still respecting a multitude of real ecological limits - not just atmospheric gas concentrations, but topsoil depth, water supplies, toxic chemical concentrations, and the health of ecosystems, including the diversity of life they depend upon.

In time, we will have to recognise that it is not 'nature' that we need to protect, but ourselves, and we can only do this by abandoning the old, grandiose, profit-seeking schemes so beloved of our masters and learning to till the soil, live to scale, and live within our means.

New York and Connecticut belong to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative to cut carbon emissions, and New York City has been a leader in energy efficiency.

There's no law of physics that says we have to be an unsustainable society - in fact, quite the opposite. The planet's ready to work with us if we're ready to think differently, but we do have to make that jump and start to do things in new ways.

It angers me when sustainability gets used as a buzz word. For 90 percent of the world, sustainability is a matter of survival.

I think today we recognize that economic activity needs to search for ways to protect the environment.

Carbon zero simply means that the emissions you are releasing either are zero or balance out to zero.

Raising awareness on the most pressing environmental issues of our time is more important than ever.

We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven. We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops.

What pleases me most is that sustainable development is on almost everybody's agenda now.

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

To cherish what remains of the Earth and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival.

Green technologies - going green - is bigger than the Internet. It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.

This Earth is our only home. Together, we must protect and cherish it.

So-called 'sustainable development'... is meaningless drivel.