Hank Green Quotes

I think the greatest challenge in environmentalism and the most rewarding challenge is trying to figure out how humans can meet their needs while protecting the environment.

If we are to survive on this planet, there must be compromises.

Sustainability is especially ripe for political controversy and opposition because fundamentally it is a new paradigm that represents significant challenges to the status quo. The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacities confronts dominant paradigms of progress which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth

Global warming is not only the number one environmental challenge we face today, but one of the most important issues facing all of humanity... We all have to do our part to raise awareness about global warming and the problems we as a people face in promoting a sustainable environmental future for our planet.

Perhaps, one of our greatest challenges as a nation, as a people, as human beings making sure that our grandkids can live on this Earth.

We ought to take good care of everybody we have on the planet, but we ought to regulate the rate at which people join us. The old saying is, "It's the top of the ninth inning, and humanity has been hitting nature hard, but you've always got to remember that nature bats last."

We have reached a new milestone as a human family. With seven billion of us now inhabiting our planet, it is time to ask some fundamental questions. How can we provide a dignified life for ourselves and future generations while preserving and protecting the global commons - the atmosphere, the oceans and the ecosystems that support us?

We don't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable, which is shareable with everybody on the planet, which promotes stability and democracy and human rights, and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face.

With the world's human population now at seven billion and growing, and the demand for technology and modern conveniences increasing, we can't control all our negative impacts. But we have to find better ways to live within the limits nature and its cycles impose.

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.

My role is not to choose between safeguarding the economy and protecting the environment - it's about doing both.

What we've proven is that you can protect the environment, use it wisely and grow the economy and that there is no conflict between the two.

Climate change is destroying our path to sustainability. Ours is a world of looming challenges and increasingly limited resources. Sustainable development offers the best chance to adjust our course.

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

If our economies are to flourish, if global poverty is to be banished, and if the wellbeing of the world's people enhanced - not just in this generation but in succeeding generations - we must make sure we take care of the natural environment and resources on which our economic activity depends.

One cannot take natural resources for granted just to entertain viewers.

Only people who lack wisdom would say that a project should be pursued even if it leads to wanton destruction of forests.

We are putting value in the things that really are not valuable, things like commodities or disposable stuff that can bought, but the rainforest has been undervalued, because the value shouldn't be in the trees that you take out; it's should be with leaving the trees to preserve the life system that sustains life on the planet.

The ecological crisis is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done - challenging us to a realization of a new humanity.

Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.

We have an economy that tells us it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can't print life to bail out a planet.

The sustainability revolution will, hopefully, be the third major social and economic turning point in human history, following the Neolithic Revolution - moving from hunter-gathering to farming - and the Industrial Revolution

The key to understanding the future is one word: sustainability.

For decades we have been living lives of abundance, with little regard for our natural resources or global health. But we are now facing hard choices in our energy policy. Future generations - my children and grandchildren, along with yours - will have to live with the decisions we make today. And so it is time for us to make some tough and - hopefully - smart choices regarding our energy use and production before it is too late.

Environmentalists and clean energy champions should stop telling people that we are working for "sustainability," which nobody understands.