Richard Leakey Quotes

Before the discovery of agriculture mankind was everywhere so divided, the size of each group being determined by the natural fertility of its locality.

Man's survival, from the time of Adam and Eve until the invention of agriculture, must have been precarious because of his inability to ensure his food supply.

Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and bajraks. The bajrak system identified a local leader, called a bajrakar, who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty.

I spent my thirties living out of boxes and moving every six months to a year. It was my cloud period: I just wandered like a cloud for ten years, following the food supply. I was a hunter, gatherer, an academic migrant.

But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded, calling for a redefinition of property rights.

It was remarkable to see from space how predictable people are. Our homes and towns are almost all in places with moderate temperatures, and they generally have the same shape - a thinly occupied outer blob of suburb surrounding a densely populated core, all based around a ready source of water.

Family planning is the only exit point of the land problem. No other solution is possible.

Population must increase rapidly, more rapidly than in former times, and ere long the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil.

I cannot but think that there are strong reasons for doubting the applicability of the epithet "state" to a people so low in the grade of organized society as our Indian tribes most generally

… we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land

Fair England. She has more people than she can well sustain. Goodly Ulster for want of people [has] unmaneured, her pleasant fields and rich grounds, they remain, if not desolate, worse …. Make speed, get thee to Ulster, serve God, be sober.

The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information.

In this primitive and abject state [of hunters and gatherers], which ill deserves the name of society, the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense or language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation.

I always give the analogy of the Earth at Night picture, of 7.3 billion of us, right? And everyone says, "Well, that's population." Well, if you took the entire world's population and you lived at the density of Manhattan proper - not a bad place to live - how much space do 7.3 billion people take up? The state of Colorado. At which point I end my lectures, because I want you to be thinking ... is this really a question of population, or is this a question of land use and resource consumption? And let's face it, the top 1.3 billion of us are doing all the damage. Sorry.

We must have been hunters and gatherers but some of us were just waiters and hopers.

Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.

The manner of their living is very barbarous, because they do not eat at fixed times, but as often as they please

When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove themselves elsewhere.

Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.

The privilege of feeling at home everywhere belongs only to kings, wolves and robbers.

We're designed to be hunters and we're in a society of shopping. There's nothing to kill anymore, there's nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.

From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.

We now know that climate change is a driver of migration, and is expected to increase the displacement of populations.

When we conduct agriculture, we are, therefore, altering the ecological arrangement that was responsible for our genesis as a species. I think that this is the reason that this alienation has allowed us to see and regard land mostly as a resource. So we have created a problem for ourselves from the word "go," for land is not a resource any more than humans are resources.

Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.