Margaret Atwood Quotes

We're facing growing climate change, more floods, more droughts, more crisis on a planetary level, and the systems we put in place in the twentieth century are just not going to work. We've run out of stuff. Our big problems are going to be energy supplies and food supplies. This is not a right-left issue. It's a people issue, and it cuts across all our categories.

I believe it is essential for our planetary future to develop tools that can change the consciousness which has created the crisis that we are in.

If we did not take action to solve this crisis, it could indeed threaten the future of human civilization. That sounds shrill. It sounds hard to accept. I believe it's deadly accurate. But again, we can solve it.

If, in our haste to 'progress,' the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and policy makers alike, the result will be an ugly America. We cannot afford an America where expedience tramples upon esthetics and development decisions are made with an eye only on the present.

With so much evidence of depleting natural resources, toxic waste, climate change, irreparable harm to our food chain and rapidly increasing instances of natural disasters, why do we keep perpetuating the problem? Why do we continue marching at the same alarming beat?

Civilization can never be sustainable.

We're at peak oil, peak water, peak resources, and so either we figure it out and let science lead or we head down a very bad, dark trail to where a lot of people aren't going to make it.

If we are serious about our human wellbeing - from local communities to the global world economy - we need to now reconnect our entire world to the planet.

Nothing is being done of any real significance. Our demand is the government must tell the truth about the crisis we're in. And that includes working with communities to build resilience... We want to go to net carbon zero emissions by 2015 and reduce our consumption levels.

There's one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate.

Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.

Climate change: Never before in history have human beings been called on to act collectively in defence of the Earth

I believe that climate change is the great global crisis that we face, environmental crisis. I believe that if you're serious about climate change, you don't encourage the excavation and transportation of very dirty oil.

I'm about to embark on what may be as important as an initiative as anything I do as President, trying to nudge the world in the direction of doing something serious about climate change.

The earth is warming at an alarming rate, we are running out of fossil fuels, and it is long past time for us to take action to correct these problems.

My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis, it's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act, that's a renewable resource, let's renew it.

To look at the climate crisis alone - and in my view this is an election where we're not just deciding what kind of a world we will be but whether we will have a world or not, going forward. And the climate crisis, for one thing, you know, Hillary [Clinton] has not repudiated fracking by any means, nor fossil fuels.

In Europe and America alike, voters increasingly recognize that the benefits of the green revolution aren't worth the costs, particularly when the revolutionaries don't have a clue what they're doing.

The outgrowth of conservation, the inevitable result, is national efficiency.

After all, sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.

The most important question we have to deal with is a combination of population control and the control of our environment - how to utilize the world in as effective a way as we can for the future of mankind.

All the conservation efforts in the world won't be enough to make a dent in the oncoming sustainability crisis our planet faces.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination.

The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.