Francis Alys Quotes

A world is in danger, this planet is in great danger!

Occasionally the state of the planet can knock me off my perky perch.

If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable.

Once people realized that, 'Hey, we're going to be left on Earth here, and everything is going to hell quickly,' sci-fi soon became about our own self-destruction.

We got a dying world around us.

I think Australia is pretty much living the last day on Earth in a lot of ways.

Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making.

The planet's survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.

It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgment at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day without any heavenly intervention.

We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared.

Over most of history, threats have come from nature - disease, earthquakes, floods, and so forth. But the worst now come from us. We've entered a geological era called the anthropocene. This started, perhaps, with the invention of thermonuclear weapons.

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

I grew up in Texas, but that was 20 years ago. Last year, in Fort Worth, they had hail the size of softballs. We're seeing more and more powerful storms, of all types, almost on a biblical level.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on Earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data.

There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction.

In presence of Nature's grand convulsions, man is powerless.

Just think: in all the clean, beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death.

You know, we humans are programmed to think that big changes on the Earth happened a long time ago, or will happen a long time in the future. What we don't realize is that they actually can happen right now. Right here, right now, while we're alive, in our own hours and days and months and years.

We have no control over the outcome of anything. Like the planet and global warming, we don't control that. If politicians want a war we don't control that. Acts of terrorism, we can't control them.

Since you can’t do anything about it, don't worry about the weather or the government.

If we do not act now, we will become spectators to slaughter.

Racism is a problem, economic inequality is a problem, not enough rock n' roll on the radio is a problem. But all those problems will become insignificant when the oceans rise in a way that threatens organised human activity.

Our planet is dying. Whales will be extinct before we ever get to know them. They say these creatures are so intelligent. They may disappear from the face of the Earth before we know them, and that is a great tragedy.

I have tried to keep my eco-anxiety at bay, to box it into my working life. But every month this becomes more difficult. The rising sense of panic I feel is entirely rational; we should all be feeling it. But we can't live with it through every hour of every day.

In our lifetime, we're going to see fifty percent of the world's species go extinct. We're already seeing this radical rise in the world's temperature that was predicted.